So here is a picture of my ALMOST finished rain gauge 1-wire counter refit. It works great EXCEPT the coin cell is SUPPOSED to power the DS2423 counter in the event the 1-wire bus is disconnected. I thought it was weird that when I was doing testing of my 1-wire library, shorting the bus to ground, that the count would zero out. Well, nuts, for some reason it’s not saving the count. (The PCB LOOKS nice though. 🙂 ) On my breadboarded version it works as planned; the count is preserved even if the MicroLan (1-wire bus) is disconnected. The coin cell’s 3V appears at the VBAT pin of the DS2423 on the breadboarded version but not on my PCB 🙁 After taking some measurements, apparently either I have a bad BAT54S Schottky diode at D2 (pointed to with pencil) or a bad solder connection. Hope it’s the latter, but thankfully I have spare diodes. The only saving grace was that I found this out BEFORE I installed it in the backyard.
UPDATE: The Schottky diodes are fine; I determined it’s a bad solder connection on D2 Pin1. With the coin cell installed, and measuring the voltage on pin 3 of D2, when I press down on the diode, voila!, I see about 3 volts on its pin 3, which is the way it’s supposed to work. So now back to the soldering station.