[Shannon Hicks]

As stated in the blog post about the new releases, I’m working as fast as I can to prepare all the products for shipment, and will be updating the shop and forum as soon as they are available.  The Monitoring Station Kit will take a little bit more time to be released because we’ll be changing the contents of the kit slightly.  In the meantime, I’ve been updating all the documentation for the new hardware and creating new example sketches because everyone needs to be aware of the changes required in the hardware and programming code in order to use these new boards due to the slight differences between versions.

[Shannon Hicks]

I haven’t had any issues with any loggers not recording data recently or clocks not running, including boards I just programmed this week.  But I use stable libraries from several months ago and haven’t updated them recently.  Are you using all the libraries that are available in our suggested .zip file, found here: https://github.com/EnviroDIY/Libraries  and are you using one of our sample logger sketches, or one that you’re written or modified?

 

[Shannon Hicks]

We’ve found that loggers with the Digi cell boards on them have a tendency to act a little squirrely sometimes and give either erroneous readings or cause excessive power draw.  In you case, I’d start with putting a fully-charged 4400 mAh battery on your station and see how it performs for a few weeks.  If that doesn’t solve it, investigate the solar panel, making sure the wires are okay, and putting a voltmeter on the panel output (with no load attached) on a sunny day.  We’ve seen panels fail in the field but look physically fine, but they either don’t generate the proper voltage (6v) or enough current.  If neither of those solutions fix the problem, then try replacing the cell board, or at least removing the cell board from the logger for a week or two and see what the data on the card says.  A Mayfly logger without a cell board should last several 3-6 months without a solar panel with 5 minute sampling of a CTD.  So seeing what a couple weeks of non-cellular logger activity looks like can give you a clue as to what the issue might be.  But to start with, just put a different, fully-charged battery on and go from there.

[Shannon Hicks]

The website reports on the last time data was received by the website via the cell modem.  So you’ll have data on the card that’s not on the website.  And there are 2 date/time columns in that data file, one is local time (standard) and one is UTC time.  They are 5 hours off if you’re in the eastern time zone.  So data points in the evening before midnight will have a local time that’s 5 hours behind UTC time, and thus have a date that appears one day behind, but if you look at the timestamp, you’ll see that it’s only 5 hours off.

I can see that your station started transmitting again about 30 minutes ago.  Adjusting the panel for good sun is important, but you’ll need to replace the battery with a fully-charged one, or this is going to continue.  It’s very hard for the Mayfly to recover from a fully discharged battery by itself while it’s still turned on and operating.  You can either turn it off and leave it for a few days or a week and allow the sun to charge it, or charge another battery elsewhere (either using a spare Mayfly or one of the chargers we recommend in the EnviroDIY manual).

[Shannon Hicks]

Your battery is too low.  This is the same issue that was asked about last week:  https://www.envirodiy.org/topic/battery-failing-in-the-middle-of-the-night/

Anytime your battery voltage drops below 3.55v, the logger won’t transmit, in order to save battery power and conserve enough energy to keep writing the data to the memory card even though it’s not transmitting.  It appears you station is extremely shaded since your battery voltage has been extremely low since June.  Sometimes we see this in stations that have a lot of leaves during the summer, but the issue usually resolves itself in October once the canopy opens up and allows more light.  You could also just buy a second Lipo battery and charger and swap them out a time or two during the summer to keep things at a higher level. You could also try increasing the size of your solar panel, however it’s usually easiest to just swap batteries during the summer, because you should be visiting the site regularly for cleaning or routine maintenance, so you can just swap that battery when you’re there, and also retrieve the data card which will contain any missing data that wasn’t transmitted.

[Shannon Hicks]

The data looks to me like the battery voltage dropped in July, someone replaced it with a charged battery on 8/4 and data was continuous, but then on 8/25 someone replaced the battery with the almost-dead one from earlier in the month.  And if you’re using the sample LTE logging sketch like what’s found here: https://github.com/EnviroDIY/ModularSensors/blob/master/examples/DRWI_LTE/DRWI_LTE.ino , you’ll see in line 423 of the code that the station won’t transmit data if the battery voltage is lower than 3.55v.  So your station should still be recording data onto the memory card (down to 3.4v as set in line 419), but won’t transmit unless the battery is above 3.55v.  If you replace the battery with a fully-charged one, then you shouldn’t get gaps in your transmissions.

[Shannon Hicks]

The shipment of new boards and accessories arrived 3 weeks ago.  I began testing the products and making the necessary changes to the code and documentation, but then our area was hit by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, several dozen of our stream monitoring stations were located on rivers that saw flood events greater than anything that’s happened in over 100 years.  The good new is that we got some great data and almost all of the stations survived, however many of them needed maintenance visits or repairs, so I’ve been busy with those, in addition to getting the new products ready for release.

I’ve completed the field testing of the new Mayfly board, the new LTE cell board, and few of the other new accessories.  I’ll be updating documentation and the website this week, and we’re aiming for an October 1 release date.

[Shannon Hicks]

Sounds like it’s working, that’s a standard response string for that sensor.  Is there a particular reason you’re requesting the Mega to print the result in hex instead of decimal.

[Shannon Hicks]

Based on the photo, it appears the wiring is correct, assuming the orange and brown wires are inserted sufficiently deep into the header as to make a connection with the contact down inside the hole).

Your code is different from the latest a_wild_card.ino example that we include with the current SDI-12 library files.  Are you using an older example sketch or an older library?  We had to make changes to the library last year in order to work properly with some Meter Group sensors, so perhaps you just need to update your library and/or try the simplified sample sketch that’s included with it (https://github.com/EnviroDIY/Arduino-SDI-12/blob/master/examples/a_wild_card/a_wild_card.ino)

Also, Meter Group sensors come from the factory with SDI-12 channel ‘0’ assigned to them.  You should change it to something else first (using the “b_address_change” sketch) because they operate in a TTL protocol when they’re set to channel ‘0’, so if you intend to use them as an SDI-12 sensor, changing them to a number (or letter) will cause them to work correctly with the SDI-12 sketch, assuming you put that new channel number into the wildcard sketch.

[Shannon Hicks]

Can you describe how you’ve wired the sensor to the Mega, or even better, can you post a photo showing the board and whatever setup you’re using to connecting the sensor to it?

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