Connecting Airmar 200WX to Raspberry Pi

Question

My lab team and I recently purchased an Airmar 200WX and I have been struggling to get it working on the Raspberry Pi.

The Airmar comes with its own proprietary software that runs on Windows. We installed this and managed to successfully pull data from the Airmar via a USB adapter we bought for the sensor.

The code that runs in Windows is:

import serial

port = serial.Serial(
    port='COM12',
    baudrate=4800,
    timeout=1,
    parity=serial.PARITY_NONE,
    stopbits=serial.STOPBITS_ONE,
    bytesize=serial.EIGHTBITS
)

I want to run a similar script on the Raspberry Pi, but I've been struggling to find the mount point of the device. It appears that the Raspberry Pi fails to detect the sensor when it is connected.

There is no output to dmesg when the device is plugged in. All the normal mount points (/dev/USB0, /dev/USB1, etc) do not appear to work. There are no devices mounted in /sys/bus/w1/devices/.

But I can easily verify that everything on the sensor-side of things is working as expected because immediately unplugging it and plugging it into a Windows computer with the Airmar software shows data.

So I have two questions:

1. How can I debug this behavior further? What can I try to get the device to connect?
2. How can access device hardware from a more lower-level.

Thanks so much for your help!

Answer 1

I have worked on RPi connected to both a WX200 and a WX220. I had a similar but not identical problem. The USB adapter did show up in dmesg but no serial data could be read.

This link https://blog.mahdee.com/2015/09/09/the-power-of-raspberry-pi-the-blissful-beginning/ put me on the right track. By adding the script row mentioned there in a rc.local file, the serial data could be read from the weather station.

I used minicom to read the serial data before implementing higher level software in later stages.