OKG – Richard Mudhar

The obvious place to look is this post, OpenKontrol Gateway as Data Logger from openmicros.org, which has some sample code, which didn’t work for me. It created the log file but didn’t write any data to it.

I hacked this to make it write the data

unixtime,day/month/year hour:minutes:seconds, LLAPmessage
1352219944,6/11/2012,16:39:4,ECTMPA7.866
1352219992,6/11/2012,16:39:52,EATMPA21.59
1352220052,6/11/2012,16:40:52,EBTMPA20.82

It’s also a bit more tricky to use, compared to a regular data logger. This is because the RF network is unsynchronised – the temperature nodes fire themselves up every 5 minutes, transmit a temperature reading and then go to sleep. This isn’t a polled system, and there may be other transactions on the network. The data logger simply logs all of these transactions, be they temperature readings, status readings or setting up devices – anything starting with an a is logged.

This is why I added the unix timestamp, so that it would be possible to plot these unsynchronised elements onto the same xy plot, with the timestamp along the x axis. Some data might want to be sampled more frequently than every 5 minutes, and some might be reactive, like a PIR sensor.

The receiving application has to pull all this stuff apart, first splitting the streams into the devices, using LEFT(LLAPmessage,3). This will always be aXY with XY being the deviceID

Modified program shown below

Continue reading “How to use the OpenKontrolGateway for Data Logging”

The OpenKontrolGateway a board like an Arduino Uno, but with a SD card interface, three RF board interfaces, an Ethernet board module slot and a DS1307 Real Time Clock with battery backup. It’s a nice collection of all the stuff you need to make a datalogger. If you want to retrofit a DS1307 RTC to an Arduino project Seedstudio’s Grove RTC board features the SMD version of of the chip and saves you the tiresome surface mount wrangling.

The OKG bundle at £25 gives you everything needed to box it up but I added the RTC kit and SRAM which added £12 to the cost, since a data logger without an RTC is always going to be a pain, where you have to connect up a PC to set it. That’s OK at home but no fun at the farm.

The RTC gave me a hard time right off the bat. There are a few gotchas.

You have to set the damn thing,
you need to do that to even see it started, since it can need initialisation from the SPI bus before the oscillator will start
You need a 2032 coin cell present for it to be able to work too, so no testing that without and thinking you’ll fit that later 😉

So if you ‘scope the crystal and think ‘ah, that’s why it isn’t working’ then not so fast, you may need to initialise and set it before you see any action there. I found all of this out the hard way. This is what I used to set it, which I largely pinched from LadyAda’s tutorial. One of the nice things about that is it lets you set the clock to the time the sketch was compiled, which save a whole load of faff. What you must not do then is to press reset, or switch off and on again, else it will do that all over again, setting the RTC back to the time it was compiled. You must comment out the line

    // RTC.adjust(DateTime(__DATE__, __TIME__));

and re-upload it. This listing has that line commented out, so you must uncomment it to set the clock, then recomment it.

Continue reading “Setting the Real Time clock Arduino based OpenKontrolGateway”