This is the newest addition to my 1-Wire system: A rain gauge from RainWise, with Hobby-Boards.com electronics inside.

Picture of rain gauge:

I bought this several years ago when I began my gardening frenzy, but never had a chance to install it before now. Well, of course I had, but I think my basic 1-Wire system had to mature a bit first, which it has and it’s running very well now, so it’s time to add more to the system.

The rain gauge has a filter at the bottom to keep leaves out of the internal mechanics:

I like the fact that the whole thing is black, which I hope will cause any snow to melt in the heat absorbed from the sun, so that snow will be counted as precipitation too. After all, it is falling down from the sky too, which is what I want to measure. It will probably eat hail too.

The rain gauge consists of a long 1-Wire cable, a white plastic cup with two compartments, adjustment screws and a PCB:

The amount of rain is measured by registering how many times one of the compartments of the white cup is filled. Each time a compartment is filled, the cup tips over and creates a pulse with a reed switch.

The reed switch is connected to a PCB with a counter and a backup battery. The PCB also takes care of the 1-Wire communication:

I want to connect this rain gauge to my existing Debian NSLU2 1-Wire system to be able to add more data to my RRDtool graphs.

If you want to see a really complex 1-Wire system you should definitely check out the house monitoring project made by Silvano Gai at http://ip6.com/projects/.