Tipping Bucket Rain Gauge Arduino

Introduction in this instructable we construct a rain gauge with arduino and calibrate it to report daily and hourly rainfall.

Tipping bucket rain gauge arduino.

This is the first article in a three part series that describes the construction of a tipping bucket rain gauge with a wireless connection to a picaxe controlled lcd liquid crystal display. We use this increment the bucket count and the amount of rain that has fallen. Pump up your weather station with a tipping bucket rain gauge an rf transmitter and receiver a picaxe microcontroller and an lcd. Tipping bucket rain gauges use a funnel to direct water onto a see saw of two side by side buckets.

The statechangedetection example sketch in the arduino editor was adapted to register a bucket tip. This is a tipping bucket rain gauge based on rain gauges that are used by professional meteorologists. In my gauge 100 ml of water slowly poured. It came from a damaged personal we.

As far as the arduino is concerned the rain sensor appears as a switch. Conversion of bucket tip events to mm of rain is can be done in a spreadsheet or in code. The device works by funneling rain water onto a tipping bucket which resembles a teeter totter with each end having a bucket that hold approx 2 ml of rainwater when one side fills up the bucket tips and rainwater begins collecting in opposite bucket. The buckets are sized so that a certain amount of water causes the see saw to tip usually 01 inches of precipitation collected by the funnel an 8 inch diameter funnel collects about 8 2 ml of water per tip.

When rain is detected the input is pulled to ground before returning to 5v. The tipping bucket rain gauge is the key external input that allows the system to do its job. The rain collector i am using is a re purposed rain gauge of the tipping bucket type. Rainfall mm rain gauge collection area cm2 x volume of water cm3 or ml needed to tip the bucket x 10.

When rain is detected it will generate a interrupt that we handle in the sketch. This sketch will create two devices on your vera controller.