3D Printing: humidity & keeping your PLA filament dry

It is generally agreed that you should try to keep your reels of PLA filament dry.

 

But I'm not sure that all suggested methods on the net make complete sense!

So here are my mad ramblings on storage and relative humidity.

Barometric Pressure, the BMP180 & Gambas

Some birds and other animals are thought to be sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure.

This year I plan to monitor & record pressure, in addition to activity in and around my bird nesting boxes.

The BMP180 is a very small, low cost sensor which can be used to determine temperature and atmospheric pressure. ...looks like a great place to start!

DHT22 Temperature/RH Sensor on the RaspberryPi

The DHT22 is a low cost, single wire sensor which measures temperature and relative humidity.

I started out just playing around with this thing, just wiring it to a Pi to see it working.

But I got sucked in much deeper into thinking about how it worked and assessing its limitations.

Getting & using data from OpenWeatherMap

It is easy to get local or international weather data (such as current temperature, humidity, wind speed & so on) using the OpenWeatherMap API.

 

This could be very useful to me as part of my bird box project for 2015.

But my immediate concern involves our central heating system, and how to determine the local weather conditions.

RaspberryPi + DS18B20 Temperature Sensor

The DS18B20 is a low cost, simple to use, 1-wire temperature sensor which is ideally suited for use with the Raspberry Pi.

Up to 10 of these sensors can be wired in parallel to a single Raspberry Pi GPIO pin, each giving a reasonably accurate indication of temperature.

The current Raspbian image includes support for these devices, so its quite easy to get them up and running.

BirdBox Activity Counter; what can we expect?

Fitting a sensor to the entrance of a garden bird box can provide you with additional data.

But what can you expect this data to reveal about your little feathered friends?

Prompted by ConwayChallenger's recent Blue Tit Monitor, I've just been taking another look at some bird box data from spring 2011.