Shannon Hicks

The forum is very active, there have been 7 post in just the past 24 hours alone.  Do you mean this particular thread?  Almost all of our items have been in stock on either Amazon or our new EnviroDIY Shop page for several months now, but we recently sold out of LTEbee adapters on both sites because of a huge rush of large orders a few weeks a…[Read more]

If the “Switched 3v3” or “Switched 5v” is turned off, then nothing connected to those pins will be drawing power.  But if your Mayfly board is not actually going into deep sleep, then it’s sitting in idle mode instead of actually sleeping, and that’s why it’s drawing 6ma.  Wasn’t there some recent threads about how the I2C device was keeping the b…[Read more]

It sounds like your Mayfly is not actually going to sleep.  An idle Mayfly will use around 6.5mA, and a sleeping Mayfly will use between 0.25mA and 0.5mA, depending on whether you’ve got a microSD card in the slot and the type of card.  Here’s the power consumption results from Mayfly current tests:

Mayfly current when board is powered and i…[Read more]

Sounds like it might possibly be this issue:  https://www.envirodiy.org/topic/innacurate-lipo-battery-voltage-data/

I’ve only seen it happen on a few boards since that post a couple years ago.  The only fix it to replace the bad MOSFET transistor.

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It shows you’ve got “Arduino Uno” selected as your board type. If you’re using a Mayfly, you need to change that in the “Tools–> Board” menu. Once you’ve done that, also make sure you’ve selected the right COM port.  All of this is assuming you’ve already added the Mayfly board to the IDE as a supported board,…[Read more]

Thanks for the info Brian.  I heard they were switching cable outer jacket colors soon, and a few of our workshop attendees last month received Hydros 21 sensors with black cable instead of the usual red, so I’m assuming the inner wire color changed too.  Their soil moisture sensors also changed inner wire colors a few years ago, and the manual s…[Read more]

For a Meter Hydros 21 sensor, check the manual that came with the sensor to double-check that they haven’t change the wiring colors lately, but the usual pattern is red is data, white is power, and black is ground.  So connect red to D2, white to Vcc, and black to GND.  For that screw terminal board, D2 will get connected to D7 if you plug the g…[Read more]

Data plan prices are kind of a hard thing to put an exact total on, since it varies depending on various factors the station owner can choose, like cell carrier and transmitting interval, but I can give example costs for our typical configurations and deployments.  For example, most of our stations transmit around 10 parameters every 5 minutes,…[Read more]

We typically code our stations to cutoff modem transmissions at 3.45v, and file operations at 3.4v.  The Mayfly will stop operating around 3.35v, so if you set your modem cutoff too low, then you’ll stop transmitting AND stop collecting data on the memory card at the same time.  By setting the modem cutoff a little above the memory card logging c…[Read more]

The jumper for selecting whether the I2C grove port is constantly powered or switched powered was not intended to allow the user to turn off I2C devices on that Grove port.  I designed the board that way because I wanted to give users at 2 separate Grove ports that could be powered either continuously or switched, because the other 4 Grove ports…[Read more]

Right, that’s why I’m thinking you just need a screw terminal to Grove board, and since you only need 4 wires, you can use something like this:  https://solarbotics.com/product/29118/

All bare-board electronics such as the Digi LTE cellular board and the EnviroDIY Mayfly are sensitive to static electricity and theoretically they could be damaged if you aren’t careful.  That said, the Mayfly is pretty hardy and I haven’t experienced any problems after handling multiple thousands of boards over the last few years in all sorts of…[Read more]

We used to sell the 6-pin screw terminal boards on Amazon, but don’t anymore.  We do offer a 5-pack in our EnviroDIY ship page if you want to buy 5 all at once:  https://www.envirodiy.org/product/envirodiy-grove-6-pin-screw-terminal-adapter-pack-of-5/

Otherwise as Beth said, you might be able to use a regular 4-pin screw terminal board that is w…[Read more]

Yes, Digi-Key has over 4,500 of them in stock right now:  https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/digi/XB3-C-A2-UT-001/7932027

Mouser only has ~350 right now and is slightly more expensive than Digi-Key:  https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/DIGI/XB3-C-A2-UT-001

Note that Digi (makers of the cellular modem) and Digi-Key (an electronics d…[Read more]

Here’s an update for this topic:  we’ve implemented the online shop here on EnviroDIY to sell 5-packs of various products, including the vertical microSD card adapter board.  All prices include shipping (to US addresses only).  Restocking items on Amazon has been extremely slow lately, so if anyone wants to buy Mayfly boards, kits, or ac…[Read more]

After thinking about this old code yesterday, I was curious about what actually happens if a tip occurs during a long delay period, like the 2-second delay on line 123 and and 2.5-second delay on line 125 (which are delays to give the Xbee 900mhz radio module time to successfully wake up and then finish its routine before sleeping).   I p…[Read more]

Below is the code I wrote several years ago that is still running on all our local tipping buckets.  This was way before all the ModularSensors libraries and MMW portal, so things could be written differently now, but it can give you and idea on how the Mayfly handles the interrupt signal from the tipping bucket.

First you need to enable the…[Read more]

Meter Group sensors like the Teros 12 come with either bare wires or 3.5mm stereo headphone jack plugs.  Have you already purchased your sensors?  If not, you can choose that option when you order.  You can also request a custom cable length if you need longer cables than the default length, which I think is usually 3 meters on their soil se…[Read more]

The 10HS soil sensor has a simple analog voltage output that is easy to measure with an Arduino board by doing an analog voltage measurement.  The Teros 12 has a digital output in either TTL or SDI-12 format.  I’d recommend SDI-12, especially if you’re going to have more than one sensor connected to the same board, since then you can assign a d…[Read more]

Is there a benefit to using a Trinket for counting the tips instead of using the Mayfly?  I’ve built a bunch of tipping bucket recorders using only Mayfly boards by just connecting the bucket’s reed switch to the Mayfly pin D10 and using code to look for an interrupt to wake the Mayfly, increment the count, and go back to sleep.  It records and t…[Read more]