Hey Bill, no problem. I can't provide pictures right now but will when I get home. I'm using an 8000 mAh battery I got from ebay (I may upgrade to a 12000 mAh), that is connected to an Adafruit Solar Lipo charger. I also bought a 6 volt solar panel from ebay or amazon, can't remember right now, but the adafruit charger works best with a 6v panel. The charger board has a connector for the battery, the solar panel and the load as well as an older mini-usb connector to charge the battery from an ac usb adapter if you just want to top up the battery when it's too low and it's really cloudy. You can also configure the rate of charge with the addition of a resistor to boost the charge rate to 1000 mA which is what I did. Most lipo's can only handle a charge rate of 1C (C being the capacity of the battery) so I'm well within the 8000 mAh that the battery could take charge wise. I'm currently experimenting with how many days I can go without intervention (hence the reason I may go with a larger 12000 mAh battery to get more days of autonomy out of the weather station). Ideally I would like it to run 24x7 without intervention.
To save power I do with the Particle P1 redboard is that I have configured it to run in manual mode, meaning I control the wifi and cloud connections. Because I have a local phant server collecting the raw sensor data from the redboard I have no need to connect to the cloud and because I have it in manual mode I briefly turn on the wifi every 2 minutes to dump the sensor data to my phant server in the house. Wifi is by far the biggest power consumer so the more you can control that the better. I'm waiting for a 6 dBi wifi antenna to put on the particle P1 because I've noticed that sometimes the wifi doesn't connect where I have it placed inside my shed. All the sensors are outside the shed of course, but I wanted as much of the electronics sheltered from the elements for longevity sake. The only active electronics I have outside is the BME280 sensor inside my own home brew radiation shield I made out of flower pot trays. While I only post data to weewx every 2 minutes, the station is processing data continuously, so rather than feed for example the current wind direction and speed, I dump the average wind direction and speed over 2 minutes to weewx. In a previous iteration of my weather station I had it sleeping during each cycle but that proved to be a problem for getting accurate rain readings because if the station was asleep it would miss a bucket tip. So I went with a larger battery and then controlled the wifi, which saves a ton of power. The system has a rescue mode so that if the battery falls below 20% soc it will begin sleep cycles of 5 minutes so that the solar panel can pump all the power into the battery until it rises above that threshold and comes back online. So far so good, hasn't had to do that yet, but it may tonight because we've had quite a few overcast days lately. Let me know if you want more specifics and I'll help fill in the blanks. On Monday, 30 January 2017 09:59:03 UTC-5, Bill Morrow wrote: > > Robert, can you share any details on the solar powered Redboard? My > weather station is based on an Arduino Pro Mini, powered by an old Li-ion > camera battery. The weather station sleeps most of the time, waking up > briefly every 10 seconds or so to sample weather. I get about 2 weeks out > of the battery, then swap it. > > It's all housed inside an old solar garden lantern and a container which > originally held some delicious carrot ginger soup. It communicates with a > Raspberry Pi 1 in the house via nrf24L01 radios, using the RF24Mesh > libraries. The radio is pretty power hungry, and the main reason for the > large sleep duty cycle. On the left of the case, you can see the antenna > pointing at the base station in our house. > > > <https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-cf4BRy65O2w/WI9S_5UBXLI/AAAAAAAAEfY/YPV_pxfK36cppzaMq9XYPsbg0Lr7F0gKgCLcB/s1600/weather_lantern.jpg> > > The temperature sensor shield on the bottom is made from some sports drink > bottles. > > My main project these days is developing a circuit which will use the > small amount of power generated by the cell to keep the battery charged. > I've done some measuring, and it should be enough. I've gone down the > rabbit hole of tiny surface mount components, so making slow progress. > > Oh, and this is all supposed to be done under a zero cost budget! > > On Monday, 30 January 2017 10:33:58 UTC-4, Robert Mantel wrote: >> >> Seems like raspberry pi systems are like snowflakes...lol. I use a solar >> panel charged battery powered Particle P1 Redboard from Sparkfun that I >> have an I2C BME280 (temp/pressure/humidity/altitude) sensor, a rain/wind >> set from sparkfun as well. The redboard sends weather data over WiFi to my >> Phant server every two minutes, I have a cron job on my Pi that does a >> jsonp query to the phant server to retrieve the latest record and parse it >> out into a text file with the "* = *" pairs that fileparse wants. Then my >> weewx system running on my pi archives every 2 minutes. Not realtime, but >> good enough for my purposes. I also have steelseries gauges running as >> well. Been a great learning experience and everyone here has been very >> helpful. >> >> Many ways to skin the cat here. >> >> On Monday, 5 December 2016 04:32:46 UTC-5, Joaquin Lopez wrote: >>> >>> Hello, at the School we have this weather station >>> https://www.raspberrypi.org/education/weather-station/ >>> >>> It would be possible to configure the weewx system to be able to receive >>> the data from the different sensosrs of our weather estation? >>> >>> Thanks in davance! >>> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to weewx-user+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
