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By td4dotnet
#200569
I built a weather station for our garden and it ran fine for a number of months until one day during a particularly heavy downpour I noticed to my horror that my 3d printed box for the project had burst open spilling its guts out :-(

I don't know how long it was like that (probably no more then 10 or 20 minutes) and it (other than the problem I'm having) seems to function correctly, i am running a sparkfun redboard, electric imp wifi shield (the one with the clever SD card) and the weather shield (https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/we ... okup-guide <- that one).

So the problem I'm having is that since the board got moist my temperature and pressure readings are off the scale, the only reference I can find online is a post from 2013 where two members seem to discuss something similar:

I’m trying to use the Weather Shield with an arduino mega. I works fine with an uno, but when I connect it to a mega the temp, humidity and pressure readings are way off (by hundreds or thousands of units). The instructions say that this board can be used with other Arduinos with modifications, but it doesn’t say what those are. I need something bigger than an uno as I’m using more sensors and an ethernet shield to complete my project. Help!!!

Member #728670 / about 3 years ago / 2
After quite a bit of tinkering and troubleshooting, my problem was that the SDA and SCL pins were not connected to the Mega. The root cause was a bad Ethernet shield placed between the Mega and the Weather Shield. This same configuration worked ok on the Uno, but not on the Mega. Creating jumpers up to the Weather Shield for SDA and SCL pins solved the problems.

If your shield returns 999 or 998 for any of the variables, you’re seeing a I2C error code.


Sadly I'm at a loss now as I don't really know how to proceed with this, part of me thinks I've managed to irrevocably harm something that's now broken or it's as above where I need to do some sort of pin bridging arrangement? Please help as I really miss having my station pushing my data to Wunderground where I can view it. I realise it's very hard to track this sort of thing down via forum posts so I appreciate any help with this.

As an aside I was wondering if the temp / pressure sensor is indeed puggled could I perhaps rig up one of those small modules like the BME280 to get around this problem? Other than the temp / pressure the rest are working correctly.

Many thanks for any help and let this be a lesson to anyone considering whipping up a snazzy project box with their 3d printer, maybe you should just buy an actual weatherproof container instead. Hell a tupperware box would have been better... :(
By jremington
#200576
If circuits under power get wet, electrolysis and corrosion usually cause irreversible damage.

Your only repair option is to take everything apart, clean the PCBs and components as well as you can (washing PCBs in distilled water is fine, but is not OK for some sensors), dry everything extremely well and test each component separately.

It may be that only one or two of the sensors has been destroyed.