Hello, my name is Keylin Gómez. I work at the National University of Costa Rica, in the Oceanography Laboratory. We want to install a Spotter buoy. We have a low-cost oxygen sensor, but we don’t know how to connect it using Bristlemouth. Does anyone know what we need to make this connection?
Hey there @Keyling_a – thanks for your post.
This is a really nice looking oxygen sensor. I’ve got a few tips for you to help get your integration started. I’ll separate them in to mechanical, electrical, firmware, and operational sections.
Mechanical
This sensor looks water resistant but doesn’t say anything in the screenshot about being depth rated. Both on the sensor side and the connector side. On the connector side, it’s probably okay to use one of the penetrators from Blue Robotics as shown in this guide.
The sensor itself is pretty compact and shouldn’t be too hard to mount alongside the dev kit.
Electrical
I didn’t see a spec sheet but I’m assuming that RS485 based sensor will be low power draw. We want to keep things under 3W both continuous and peak. This likely wont be a problem. The pinout and dev board configuration for RS485 can be found on this section of the RS485 integration example.
Firmware
One of the biggest challenges will be to understand the sensor output and figure out the best way to parse the data from it. It would be helpful to know what the different modes are (if any), what the sensor defaults to when it starts up, and what the data formatting looks like generally.
- Usually to find this out you can consult the sensor’s data sheets or integration guides.
- The next step would be to see if you can connect the sensor to your computer using serial and see the data there–confirming what you learned from the step above.
- Afterwards you’ll need to figure out how to build a the data parsing part of your program. Following the “simple application” guide (along with the RS232 guide and the RS485 guide) you can get a pretty good idea of where to start.
Operational
A DO sensor is probably optical. You’ll need to come up with a good biofouling mitigation strategy that may include a wiper. I’ve heard good things about the zebratech battery powered one.
If you’d like more information on some of this stuff please share a link to the sensor’s data sheet so we can take a deeper look.