Hardware faults

We had a bit of a glitch with the weather station reporting rainfall and what I found was not what I expected
I had constructed a list of likely problems that would have stopped rainfall detection (but nothing else) on my weather station:
  • weak signal due to the rain itself (not supported by the signal strength graph)
  • tipping bucket blocked (sometimes spiders spin webs that obstruct the movement of the bucket that measures the rain)
  • blocked funnel into tipping bucket (leaf litter or bird deposited item sometimes block water getting into the measuring device)
the third of these was closest to the truth - but I really didn’t expect algal slime to block water getting to the tipping bucket.

All cleaned up now ... but may have to look at an algal suppressant if this happens again.

And the lesson for software professionals ... theories are important to forming solutions and understanding problems ... but they are only theories they need to give way in the face of evidence.