When playing around with the MS5803 pressure sensor i used my finger to test the pressure and some of the gel protectant came off. I want to know if this messes up any readings and if so is there anything that can be done to fix it. I have applied a picture below the gel is the white stuff in the ring. Any advice on how to tackle this ?
It’s possible that this may cause an issue with your readings, but you’d need to test the sensor to see if it’s working correctly. Unfortunately if you’re not getting accurate results, you would need to replace the sensor since we don’t know what the gel is made from or how much needs to be applied for the sensor to work correctly.
A quick way to test the sensor would be to run the example sketch and then check to see what Pressure ABS reading you’re getting and compare that to a recent weather report at a nearby airport and see if the two numbers are close. (They will almost never be the exact same.)
In this example, I checked the current conditions for the Boulder airport (which is about 4 miles away and roughly the same altitude as SparkFun) on the [National Weather Service’s webpage and compared it to what I was reading. Pressure at the airport was 835.437 and I’m reading 838.70 here.
](National Weather Service)