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Ultrasonic Anemometer
#13
(2021-01-16, 04:41 PM)GMeloche Wrote: Hi CaptnBry, I am new member as I discover your forum yesterday, I am very interest on Ultrasonic Wind speed/direction as I trying from last month to design and make one from scratch (components) and discover last week this unit HY-wdc2e witch I did contact them and they asking us $139.00 + shipping as they made a big batch of them, color black, RS232, RS485 NMEA-0183, so very attractive price. I uspect that they use Arduino STM32 as CPU just a guest. But I am interesting to use an ESP32 witch I could communicate in WIFi/BLE mode instead. I am a fan of using openCPN in W10 and Android. I use Visuino to develop my circuits on Arduino and ESP's MCU devices, so don't need to be a programmers in CC+ language. I use UNIX type of OS all my life and today I try to avoid this type of OS. Android and W10 period. I am interest in flowing up with this project of Ultrasonic device. Very..Very interesting.

Hello GMeloche and welcome Aboard !

I too considered making an ultrasonic anemometer from parts.
But the price ($139USD is even better !) is the almost price of parts.
The fast ESP processors are needed for measuring the sound wave speed.
Interfacing a $139 device to OpenPlotter (OpenCPN) should be more simple.
The BLE is very interesting too.

Do you have success passing data from your circuit to OpenCPN?

(2021-01-17, 05:55 AM)seandepagnier Wrote: I have a few concerns but otherwise ultrasonic sounds great.

1)  wifi latency - from esp32 to esp32 probably ok, but going to raspberry pi I would ensure it is always below 100ms (prefer 10ms)  or it will not be suitable for autopilot.   Can we determine if this is possible?   I think it may require an external esp32 to receive on a dedicated wifi/bt, and this would communicate with the pi on a serial port. The linux wifi stack cannot be relied on for realtime.  It may work great for a while then get stuck and not send/receive data for more than a second.  Especially if other wifi transfers are going on to another machine or something.  Otherwise it will work with degraded performance, and people will just do it anyway and not realize that their boat is not steering as efficiently on wind mode as it really should.  So I realize I cannot convince everyone, but this is the reason I do not want wireless wind sensors.   You have to run power to them anyway and 4 wires is as easy as 2.
2)  accuracy -   are these sensors actually accurate to 1 degree?   I seriously doubt it, and it's clear from the picture that they are not designed to take air when tilted but are intended to be perfectly vertical.   When tilted turbulence will probably mess up the reading.   At least a rotating vane feels wind the same as a sail so it compenates for this mechanically.   To do this with ultrasonic needs tilt sensor and software compensation which is much more complicated.
3)  cost -  I'm not sure ultrasonic will ever be as cheap as mechanical.  I built mechanical sensors which cost a fraction of the $139 figure and are accurate to 0.1 degrees.
4) power consumption - I don't think these use much power, but how much?  For comparison, my mechanical ones are using 13 milliamps at 5 volts, so with linear regulator, 13 milliamps at 12 volts which is 1/6th watt.
5)  heavy rain - it's well known that ultrasonic sensors cut out at some point if the rain is heavy enough.   I also wonder how the accuracy is affected.   Mechanical sensors feel rain the same way the sails do again, so even if the reading is different, it gives what you want.

I could probably make  a list for why ultrasonic are probably better too.

Hello seandepagnier and Welcome Aboard !

You bring up some very good points with excellent technical referencing, thank you.

1) & 4) Latency & Power: Racers and Autopilots I think are the fastest data stream demand Users. Any hardware output will have some software smoothing/averaging/algorithm (inverse sum of the squares for example) best suited to that application.

???   I think our focus here should be just the raw data stream?

One method might be a BLE from the Anemometer to a dedicated slave BLE that connects serial directly to the RPi GPIO pins. BLE is low power and fast enough for audio, so it should meet our needs. The receiving ESP32 could format to SignalK JSON on the fly. Another Member suggested the manufacturer could supply a faster data stream, since they have an extensive design team in-house. 10Hkz was suggested by some Racers. A small solar cell/Lipo Battery might be enough to power the anemometer without any wires at all.

2) Accuracy your previous experience with mechanical wind sensors is excellent. "..Feel the wind & rain like the sails" sounds very correct to me.
For an Autopilot, such as pyPilot or your own, wouldn't a tilt sensor (9-axis accelerator), magnetic compass and GPS heading also be part of the algorithm? My mechanical Monitor Wind Vane 'autopilot' does the tilt compensation with a clever weight design and the boat's motion.

3) Cost, yep its going to be more expensive, but this IS "the new stuff". Browsing the West Marine catalog makes this project seem like a bargain to me Big Grin

5) heavy rain; Ya got me on that one.  Undecided

May I ask your suggestions for a mechanical wind speed sensor? Ray-marine now sells "my idea", LoL. They call it the Rotovector Z195. The the "cups" sense speed & direction with a non-linear cup design and an Index Pulse.


Cheers !

(2021-01-17, 02:27 PM)GMeloche Wrote: Hi, I did found this URL, it is in french and this guy purchase it and made some test on it, this morning I did send him if he had a chance to open it and see what is inside, waiting for answer.
https://faire-ca-soi-meme.fr/domotique/2...n-du-vent/

Great Link !
The Translate to English button worked fine.
He did a really nice write-up !
Reply


Messages In This Thread
Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-04, 06:50 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by SailAlpha - 2021-01-04, 07:36 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-16, 02:20 AM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-05, 12:58 AM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-09, 05:30 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by GMeloche - 2021-01-16, 04:10 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by Sailoog - 2021-01-13, 12:38 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by GMeloche - 2021-01-16, 04:41 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by rastam4n - 2021-01-17, 03:35 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-18, 06:12 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by seandepagnier - 2021-01-21, 03:43 AM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-22, 03:16 AM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by seandepagnier - 2021-01-17, 05:55 AM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by GMeloche - 2021-01-17, 02:27 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by GMeloche - 2021-01-18, 05:27 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by GMeloche - 2021-01-19, 08:49 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-30, 05:03 AM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by seandepagnier - 2021-01-22, 03:40 AM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-23, 08:58 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by GMeloche - 2021-01-30, 07:39 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-01-31, 08:33 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by GMeloche - 2021-02-19, 03:21 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by CaptnBry - 2021-02-20, 04:55 AM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by skythediver - 2023-06-27, 08:46 PM
RE: Ultrasonic Anemometer - by internetdunyam - 2023-07-01, 07:35 AM

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