Bringing Mayfly Data Logger to the UK and EU
At last year's Open Hardware Summit in Edinburgh, during a panel on environmental monitoring I came across a data logger I'd not come across before. Shannon Hicks at the Stroud Water Research Center introduced us to the Mayfly open-source data logger they developed as part of their EnviroDIY toolkit. What makes this data logger special is its support for commercial sensor probes. By using calibrated off-the-shelf probes there's no need for upfront sensor characterization and calibration. As someone who's spent more time than I'd like characterising the current-intensity curve of a homemade probe, the appeal of calibrated off-the-shelf sensors is obvious.
The Mayfly has an add-on socket for accessories like 4G/LTE, WiFi/Bluetooth or an OLED display, and includes Grove ports, Qwiic/Stemma-QT ports, SD card sockets and a real-time clock powered by a coin cell battery. It can be powered using LiPo batteries and a solar panel, and can be programmed using the Arduino IDE or PlatformIO.
EnviroDIY has a river quality monitoring project that covers four US states and 13,000 square miles. They monitor the tributaries of the Delaware River Basin using the Mayfly, as governmental monitoring stations only cover the main river. This monitoring includes CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth) and turbidity measurements, and all the data is transmitted in real-time to their online portal.
After the panel I had a short chat with Shannon and discovered that they are looking for distributors outside the US, and I mentioned that we would be interested in stocking their products at LabCrafter for the UK and EU markets. Fast-forward a year and we're about to start selling the Mayfly data logger (as a stand-alone board), a starter kit (which includes the board, an enclosure and a solar panel) and a 4G/LTE cellular module called the LTE Bee. Before committing to stock these, I wanted to confirm the cellular module works on UK networks, and it does; using a Soracom SIM card I had one reporting over EE.
If you're running a river monitoring group, a citizen-science project or teaching environmental monitoring here in the UK or EU, the Mayfly is a rare thing: a logger that's genuinely open, well-documented and field-proven over years of real deployments. Until now it was only sold in the US, so getting hold of one over here meant either knowing someone or going without. This is exactly the gap we wanted to close. The board, starter kit and LTE Bee will be listed at LabCrafter shortly; I'll add the link here once they're live.
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