[Shannon Hicks]

The station at Punches Run has been back online for several hours now. It has a 4G board on it. The cellular hardware is either 4G only or 2G only. The connectivity issues are occurring somewhere in Hologram’s system behind the scenes and I don’t know any of the details, other than all of our 2G stations are still offline, and some of our 4G stations were offline yesterday, but most (if not all) are back online, some were not affected at all. There have been several outage problems like this in the past 5 years that we’ve been deploying cellular-equipped loggers, and we usually just have to be patient and wait for the carriers and service providers to fix their issues. That’s why the Mayfly loggers have redundant on-board memory cards for storing sensor data. So no data has been lost, and owners will just have to visit their stations to retrieve the memory cards to fill in the data gaps from the periods of missing cellular data.

[Shannon Hicks]

There was a major worldwide outage with Hologram yesterday that is still being resolved. You can read more about the details here on their status page: https://status.hologram.io/

So it’s not a MonitorMyWatershed outage, it has only affected EnvidoDIY stations with 2G modems, because none of our stations with 4G modems were affected. T-Mobile is the only provider for 2G right now, and they are planning to decommission their 2G network at the end of 2020, so we have been making plans to upgrade all of our existing stations from 2G to 4G by the end of the year. This 2G outage gives us a glimpse of what it would look like in January when all the 2G stations will drop offline. Upgrading from 2G to 4G involves visiting each station, reprogramming the Mayfly, and replacing the modem and antenna, and adding a LTEbee adapter. So it requires about $100 worth of hardware and visiting each station, of which we have about 40, so it’s a time-consuming process but will be necessary to keep everything online.

So any stations currently offline right now are likely using 2G hardware, and Hologram says things should be returning to normal soon. The owners of these stations should start to consider upgrading their hardware before the end of the year in order to prevent the permanent 2G outage that is inevitable. And if your 2G station doesn’t come back online in the next few days after everything returns to normal, you might visit it and check the battery. Sometimes cell outages stress the battery by causing excessive connection times every 5 minutes, which can drain the battery faster, especially in areas that are shaded by the full leaf canopy this time of year.

[Shannon Hicks]

Good news, Amazon finally processed the shipments and our items show up again in their system, but there will still be a delay until they’ve fully distributed within their warehouse network and start shipping them out. Also remember that if you want to purchase more than 10 of any of the items, we’d really prefer you to contact us directly at mayfly@envirodiy.org so that we can keep the Amazon inventory for customers who want to buy smaller quantities.

[Shannon Hicks]

For anyone looking or an update on board availability: We sent a huge shipment of boards, kits, and adapters to Amazon almost 3 weeks ago, they received them a few days later but still have not processed them and added them back into their inventory. So we’re still waiting for that to happen, and the products will not show up on Amazon until they’ve processed that shipment. Sorry for the delay.

[Shannon Hicks]

All of the data lines on the Mayfly run at 3.3 volts. The 2.2k resistors on the I2C lines are the pullup resistors that are required per the I2C design spec.

[Shannon Hicks]

As stated above, I’m prepping the products right now for shipment to Amazon, so they should be available whenever Amazon receives them, processes them, and lists them as available on their system again. I have no idea how long their side of things will take, sometimes it’s only a few days, but lately it’s been more like a week or more. Amazon is still our only sales outlet, so there’s no other ways to purchase them.

[Shannon Hicks]

There’s also the possibility that the LTEbee adapter board is broken or dead. We’ve had a few rare instances of them not working due to a manufacturing defect on the first batch of boards. So if you’ve got another LTEbee adapter you could swap out, or get a carrier board for the Xbee LTE module, you can determine which is the dead part.

[Shannon Hicks]

Are you using one of our LTEbee adapters between the Digi Xbee LTE module and the Mayfly board? https://github.com/EnviroDIY/LTEbee-Adapter

[Shannon Hicks]

We received a shipment of new boards from the manufacturer last week, and I’m working right now on testing and packaging everything, so we’ll be sending them to Amazon next week and they should be available on there shortly after that.

[Shannon Hicks]

We currently only have the option of selling via Amazon and shipping to US customers only, as it is limited by our Amazon seller account. We hope to one day have other options for all the international requests we’ve gotten, but don’t have any other official options right now. Our current Amazon inventory is also dwindling due to all the shipping and fulfillment issues relate to ordering, stocking, and replenishing the warehouses. So we just ask everyone to be patient until things can return to normal. The Mayfly logger, starter kit, and all the accessories are still being produced and supported by EnviroDIY and the Stroud Water Research Center, they will just appear and disappear from the Amazon system occasionally as their inventory system deals with various logistics issues.

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