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Originally Posted by ITD
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Let me know if you need any help with the "Winni Wave-o-meter", sounds like a 6 cocktail project to me.  |
Your wording is so apropos
I wanted to make a system without the typical mechanical float so I looked for some electronic method. Long story short, I came across the link below as the simplest way (minus the RF parts) to do what I wanted*.
http://www.merl.com/papers/docs/TR2002-21.pdf
------------ CAUTION GEEK ALERT CAUTION -------------------
-- Look away now or you'll be "Dilbert-ized" and be unable to have children or anything recognizable as a life --
*So what did I want ... well I wanted to be able to have a system that recorded the highs and lows of the water level for a week unattended. That meant some storage device like the ubiquitous USB flash "drives" we see. Better yet I wanted to record enough measurements in fine enough increments (+/-5' in 8 bits = ~0.5" resolution) to be able to reconstruct the each wave moment by moment (? 10 Hz, more ?), not just record the highest high, the lowest low. I wanted to be able to time stamp the measurements and lastly it had to be cheap enough that several could be built w/o breaking my "frugal" nature
So a simple micro-controller (uC) like in the URL, a parallel plate capacitor that sits partial submerged, a reference cap, a battery, a USB drive, some switches and an LCD display for user input/output and the mechanical housing, PWB, etc and you have it ... the Winni Wave-o-meter. Clamp it to your dock post or perhaps anchor it offshore and once a week swap USB drives. Review the data on your PC using Excel or such. Next time people are talking about wave or wake heights we might actually have some facts to back them up
Biggest problem (for me) is programming the uC to write to the USB drive. I'll have to ask "Mee" for some help there.