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Tuesday 26 November 2013

The AirPi is working!

I'm surprised! Astonished!! Gobsmacked!!! I'm a programmer, not a hardware engineer. I built a crystal radio that worked when I was 14, but I haven't advanced much since then. I can use a soldering iron, but I'm not proficient.

Yesterday, the AirPi arrived. Today, I built it. It comes as a kit of parts, plus a PCB, and you have to solder the parts into the PCB. There's lots of scope for getting it wrong; chips to solder in the wrong way round. I did manage to solder one component into the wrong place, and unsoldering it was the dickens, but eventually I had something that was as close as I was ever going to get.

So then I fired up a Raspberry Pi, connected the AirPi, and went through the very long process of installing the software for it. And then I tried to run it. At first, I thought it wasn't working, no great surprise, because I was getting a stream of messages "Error accessing 0x20: Check your I2C address". But then I noticed that there was more; occasionally it was saying:


Temp-DHT:    26.6 C
Humidity:    21.6 %
Air Quality:    0.00 
Light Level:    32.85 Lux
UV Level:    0.02 UVI
Temp-BMP:    26.9 C
Pressure:    102357.0 Pa
NO2:    0.193 ppm
NO2 ohms:    69975.0 ohms
CO:    0.000 ppm
CO ohms:    691589.4 ohms

And that looks hopeful.

So I connected it up to Xively, and you can see it here.

What you're seeing there, is the conditions in my garage, where it's currently running. It'll stay there for a while - tomorrow I'm going out on a 12 mile trek, and the day after I'll be waddling like a penguin. But when I come back from Eurodisney, I'll A) install it outside, and B) make the display a lot easier to understand. For example, the pressure is currently in pascals, but this is usually given in millibars (1 millibar = 100 pascals). And UV Level needs some explaining.

Update ... I've done the display

4 comments:

  1. WOW!! Whoa!! Well done you!! I'll have to get one now, as I mentioned it to you earlier! Are you going to register/display it at Airpi too?

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  2. argh! I have just gone to order one and there is a waiting list!!

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  3. Same here normally I hear about these pi things quite early but missed this one but will be getting one.

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  4. I got one what did you do for housing in the end and if outside power?

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