Tag Archives: Well Depth Sensing

Electronics, Projects

Well Depth Sensing: Soldering, Soldering, Soldering!

In my previous post, I designed a 3D printed sensor junction box for my well tank depth sensing project. In this post I solder… a lot.

I have 36 RJ45 jacks, 36 breakout boards for those jacks, and a pile of break-off headers for those breakout boards. Each breakout board has 8 holes for the RJ45 jack pins and 8 more holes for the header pins. That’s 36 * (8+8) connections I need to make to attach the breakout boards to the jacks. That’s 576 connections to solder!

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3D Printing, Projects

Well Depth Sensing: Mechanical Design

In my previous post, I finished the Web Service that the ESP8266 uses to upload well tank temperatures (and eventually a depth estimate) to a cloud database. In this post, I turn to the mechanical design of the case for the RJ45 jacks for the 1-wire interface.

Since my last post, I’d ordered and received some RJ45 jacks and breakout boards from Sparkfun.  I’m planning to use an RJ45 jack on a half-sized breadboard as the interface between the ESP8266 Thing Dev board and the 1-wire bus.

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Coding, Projects

Well Depth Sensing: Temperatures are in the Database

In my previous post, the ESP8266 Arduino Sketch was reading 12 temperature sensors. In this post, I describe the progress on the web side of things: the PHP web service that stores temperatures in an SQL database.

I’m really happy with the ESP8266 so far: it reliably connects to a given WiFi access point, and now it’s reliably doing an HTTPS POST of data to my PHP web service.

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Projects

Well Depth Sensing: Measuring the Tank

In my previous post I started the electronics and software for an Arduino Sketch for an ESP8266 WiFi microprocessor and several MAX31820 temperature sensors, that will eventually estimate and upload the level of water in our well water tank.

Since my last post I’ve updated the github repo for the project to read 12 temperature sensors and to do a better job of reporting WiFi errors. That code now successfully identifies and reads the temperature from 12 MAX31820 sensors via a Sparkfun ESP8266 Thing Dev board, all on a breadboard for now.

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