Shannon Hicks

We’ve published some sample power usage readings over the years, but it varies by station configuration and board version and a few other settings.  But in general, a Mayfly v1.1 revB board with an EnviroDIY sim7080 LTEbee will use about 8 mA at idle, 0.650 mA in sleep mode, and a max of 110 mA for a few seconds when actively transmitting.  But y…[Read more]

Your questions are all very subjective to a variety of operating conditions, so I can only give you some broad estimates of what we’ve experienced with the 300+ stations we’ve installed and maintained.

We typically put a 4400mah Lipo battery on the Mayfly boards because on standard logger configuration, they can be charged fully by a 3.5w or 5w…[Read more]

You’re right, you correctly have your sensor’s signal white wire connected to the Grove cable white wire, which goes to the AA1 pin of the Aux Analog grove jack, so you can disregard my suggestion to change the ADS1115 code to adc0, and just leave those two lines as they were, using adc1.

You’d have to check with Meter Group to find out what the sensor communication protocol is.  There’s nothing on their website to indicate what sort of output it has.

If you’re able to swap out a Hydros21 manufactured in 2022 with your hardware and everything works fine, but sensors from 2023 aren’t working, then it’s possible that they’ve made another design change that requires some tweaking of the ModularSensors code library to make them work correctly.  We’ve had a report of one other person having trouble…[Read more]

First you should attach the sensor’s clear wire to the GND pin of the screw terminal board along with the black wire.

Second, the sensor needs at least 5 volts of excitation power, and the jumper setting of the Aux Analog Grove jacks in your photo is set to the default 3v position.  You need to move that jumper to the 5v position.  See the s…[Read more]

Does the sensor have bare wires or a 3.5mm stereo plug?  Either way, ensure that the sensor is connected properly to the Mayfly with the sensor power wire going to a 3.3v or 5v constantly powered pin during the address changing sketch.  And make sure that the data wire of the sensor is connected to the proper Mayfly pin, which is usually D7 in t…[Read more]

Yes, they were all bought shortly after re-listing.  I’ll be working to build more as soon as I can.

If you’re keeping the Switched Power Out LED on all the time, then that is also powering the Aux 3v regulator, the 5v boost regulator, and the 12v boost regulator, as well as the LED.  I haven’t measured the current draw of all of those things while the board is sleeping, but it is most certainly the reason your battery drains so quickly.  You c…[Read more]

How are all your Atlas sensors connected to the Mayfly?  Through the I2C grove port?

Your github repo isn’t public so I’m not able to view it.  I’d have to see the sketch to understand what’s going on with the logger code, but I’m guessing there’s a variety of factors involved in the failure.  One is that it looks like your station uses way too much power overnight, so either it’s not sleeping properly or you’ve got some LEDs on o…[Read more]

SDI-12 sensors usually use 12 volts for sensor excitation because that’s what the specification for the protocol dictates.  Fun fact:  the “12” part of “SDI-12” does not refer to the voltage, but rather the baud rate, so the name actually means “serial-digital interface at 1200 baud”).  Back in the days when the protocol was first being used, mo…[Read more]

There’s one 3.3v regulator that’s always powered on the Mayfly (anytime the Mayfly power switch is ON, even if the processor is put to sleep), and that can be found along the top (inward end) of each of the 20-pin headers, helpfully next to the GND pin you’d also need for sending power to an external device.  The three switched power options…[Read more]

We sold the last couple kits last week and I hadn’t updated the status page yet to indicate that, but I just did.  There were some supply issues with some of the parts in the starter kits and full station kits, but that should be resolved soon and the kits back in stock in about a week.  The rest of the custom EnviroDIY electronic items like the b…[Read more]

As long as you’re using the latest Hydros21 library file that has the longer sample time (500ms warmup and 1000ms sample time, as shown here:  https://github.com/EnviroDIY/ModularSensors/blob/master/src/sensors/MeterHydros21.h) then it sounds like maybe a faulty sensor.  Or it could be that the Mayfly isn’t waiting long enough to either warm up o…[Read more]

No exact date yet, but we’ve ordered all of our inventory items and now are just waiting.  I’ll update the Availability page with exact dates if we get more detailed info.

The sensor manufacturer has assured me that the sensors will work at 3.3v, and we’ve had experience with hundreds of them and concur, but they’ll also work just fine with the jumper set to 5v instead, so it’s your choice.

This thread is for overall technical questions about the hardware on the Mayfly v1.1 boards, so if you have other questions…[Read more]

The Mayfly makes 3.3v, 5v, or 12v, as set by the jumpers on the headers next to each Grove socket.  The ClariVue sensors need 9 or 12v, but at lower temperatures (below 5C) we’ve found that some of the sensor will stop working because the Mayfly can’t produce enough current at 12v at low temperatures.  So to fix this issue, you can just change t…[Read more]

There are multiple sources of power on the Mayfly boards.  There’s 3.3v that’s always on, then there’s a separate 3.3v regulator that can be switched on and off by setting pin D22 high or low in your code.  There’s also a separate 5v boost regulator (and on Mayfly v1.x) a 12v boost regulator, both of which are also controlled by D22 in your s…[Read more]

Thanks for the screenshot, that shows the Mayfly board is being seen by the computer, so it’s not a cable or Mayfly issue.  But Windows doesn’t know how to use the Mayfly correctly as a USB device because Windows didn’t automatically install the necessary drivers.  I’m assuming this is the first time you’ve connected a Mayfly v1.x board to this p…[Read more]