August 2018
This months small distraction.
Well, what do you do with your free gift of a Circuit Playground Express from
HackSpaceMag.
When you have a boat that is a sluggish starter and you need to analyse the system voltages.
You build a data logger.
So, here's the project.
My sports boat is slow to crank. Scary slow...
I've done the multimeter test to check all the voltage drops but on the hard it always fires up Ok.
I needed to log the voltages on the water.
The nice thing about the Circuit Playground Express from Adafruit is that if you program it in Circuit Python you can use the program
memory area to store data.
I'm new to Circuit Python and it has it's foibles...
But I got it working.
Eventually.
Here is a quick bench test showing the four channel output.
Logging is triggered when the starter solenoid sees 12v to energise it and it continues to log while this condition remains true.
Then you can log up to 4 voltages and work out the drops in the system.
Wired, labelled and ready to go.
Installed in the boat and ready to log.
Downloading the data is a bit of a phaf but it did the job. Now to analyse the data and solve the problem.
The only piece of real boat work I got done this month was to fit and bond the corner trays.