Reply To: Monitoring power consumption

(previous post deleted and restated)     @jp – interesting data. It very much looks like up to early October the solar was delivering enough power for the system.

Then with the seasons solar changing, the solar panel aspect is not delivering the power needed

What I would recommend is a) need to charge up the internal LiIon 4.4Ahr battery

1. b) try and get more solar power

for a) my choice is the plentiful USB battery pack  which can supply at least the 4Ahr at 5V. Your choice of Lithium primary batteries is also good – Li Primary have a good discharge characteristic – meaning 4 batteries at 6V would supply most of their power before dying. Alkaline and standard Carbon Zinc decay to about half the voltage when supplying their current.

However the AA Alkaline are rate at 3Ahr so probably a good boost to a partially dischatged 4.4Ahr battery

b) So anything you can do to help out a better solar aspect  – less shade would help, and  solar panels are best set at an optimal 45 degress or more from horizontal, but depends on the type of solar bracket. Winter sun is the more challenging, so best optimized for that – but I haven’t had much luck with low cost brackets to be able to do that.

An upgrade of the solar panel that is under 10V open circuit  and at least 2.5W ~ another option https://voltaicsystems.com/3-5-watt-panel/  and of course the range  https://voltaicsystems.com/small-solar-panels/   And also some same manufacturer here https://www.adafruit.com/product/5367

I’d be interested in what the software that you are using,

Particularly see what it thinks it is doing with low battery V – which results in what I’ve labeled as “Unmanaged Power Demand”. Its pretty amazing it still manages to get enough power to broadcast over the modem.  The .csv file from the uSD would tell more of a story of what is happening when it resets.

This would be my analysis of the  battery voltage readings from the site

 
<p style=”background: white; vertical-align: baseline; margin: 0in 0in .25in 0in;”><span style=”font-size: 10.5pt; font-family: Roboto; color: black;”>(I’m still analyzing my systems as to the gap that I’ve labeled “MMW System wide data loss”)</span></p>