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Regular Data Outages

Home Forums Mayfly Data Logger Regular Data Outages

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    • #17015
      Jake Lemon
      Participant

        Hi All. One of our stations is experience regular outages where data isn’t being sent to MMW. The outages seem to start mid to late morning daily and last for several hours. It seems like the outages correspond with the period during which battery voltage is increasing. Any ideas what could be going on here?

      • #17016
        Shannon Hicks
        Moderator

          That station appears to be running the older configuration of Mayfly v0.5b and Digi LTE board (with an EnviroDIY LTEBee adapter in between the Digi board and the Mayfly), correct?  There could be several reasons why it’s behaving like that, and it’s difficult to tell unless you start swapping parts or disconnecting things one at a time to see which thing is causing the issue.  The first thing to check would be the datacard file on the logger to see if the logger is still operating and recording data to the card even though it’s offline.  Once you know that, it’ll help us narrow down the problem.  The other quick thing to do would be to put a different lipo battery pack on the board and let that run for a few days.  We’ve seen failing battery packs cause all sorts of strange issues that were resolved by simply replacing the pack.

        • #17019
          neilh20
          Participant

            Hi Jake, my take is its complex to be able to decode why MMW isn’t showing data ~ it needs a system look, location aspects (solar looks excellent) ,  maintenance inspection of site,  reliability of hardware/battery/mechanics reliability of software on the Mayfly, reliability of software at MMW

            It would be useful to know your configuration including battery capacity and make, software version upgrades, and site sensor/maintenance as well as a picture of the insides and any observations/pictures of condensation on the board or growths.  As Shannon indicated for your particular station, it would be useful to compare it against the readings taken on the uSD, and look at the RSSI.

            Clearly though, for all the visible parameters of good solar aspect, apparently working Mayfly – it would be nice if  the data could just be available …. for maybe 5years … or how long?.   A dream.  🙂  What does it take to achieve that, is pretty challenging.

            However taking a download of data, see PMTU37-1_TimeSeriesResults_220517_1145.xlsx ~ and constructing a reliability story  –  – the system started pre-pandemic (had to throw that in) 2019 Nov 10th  .. fast forwarding to 2022 Mar-1 and looking at the data – and time difference between samples, it looks to be just an occasional data loss. Then Apr 10 to Apr 20th there is a 10day loss,  followed by losses that are in the range 4-13hours. Could this be what has been seen with https://github.com/ODM2/ODM2DataSharingPortal/issues/605

            For your system, the dribbling losses, is that the main software does not support reliable delivery.  That is the software takes a reading, attempts to deliver it to MMW and doesn’t verify its been delivered. Wireless for a specific location needs characterizing, think of the times when a cell phone doesn’t work, and then you need to shift around to find a place.   As it appears cyclical, it could be that the wind changes in the afternoon, and reduces the signal strength.  This might show if you could see the RSSI through the times its not reporting.  Your station level of -77dBm  appears to be good. The measurement is actually the measured signal strength from the last attempt, and your station numbers look reasonable once it starts up, though there are a few at -100dBm which is much worse than -77dBm

            However the post 2022 Apr-28th many hours of losses are much more difficult to figure out – perhaps you could get a site visit swop out the uSD,  inspect the board for visible signs of failure, and then share the uSD contents.

            I do have reliable delivery working in my branch, and I have said I would submit to the main software git repository – a so called PullRequest (PR) but haven’t had the cycles to do it yet. https://github.com/neilh10/ModularSensors/releases . It also takes resources from Stroud to be able to accept it and do quality assurance testing – which is a challenging area.

            There are two systems I put together that use the Mayfly 0.5b, Digi LTE on Carrier and 44000mAh,  and  appear very successful, except for what appears some intermittent failures on the MMW side  in mid Apr, ending Apr 28th

            https://monitormywatershed.org/sites/TUCA_PO03/  – it does have good signal strength of RSSI  -57dbm

             

            These data losses at MMW sorta look like your losses, so it could be intermittent MMW as whatever is causing https://github.com/ODM2/ODM2DataSharingPortal/issues/605 hasn’t been commented on.

            On my system TUCA-Na13 since Apr 29th  I saw one data loss on May 15, which I wouldn’t expect as it has reliable delivery and could be MMW.    TUCA_PO03 has no losses since Apr 29th. Another system local to me https://monitormywatershed.org/sites/nh_LCC45/ that is over WiFi hasn’t had any data losses since Apr 29th

            I am focused on a delivery of devices to a TU California  project on the Russian River, and once complete in the next month hope to do the PR to the main software https://github.com/EnviroDIY/ModularSensors/issues/194 – which won’t necessarily help you, but may help future builds for more software reliability.

             

          • #17050
            Jake Lemon
            Participant

              Thanks all for the feedback. I went out to the site yesterday. One of our staff had switched out a Digi modem for an EnviroDIY modem a while back and plugged the EnviroDIY modem into the Digi adapter board. I wonder if that had something to do with the issue?

              I went ahead and switched out the logger, battery and modem as I didn’t have time to properly troubleshoot different components in the field. I’ll test what I pulled at my desktop and will share if I find anything notable.

              • #17051
                Shannon Hicks
                Moderator

                  Thanks for the followup.  Plugging an EnviroDIY sim7080 LTE bee board into one of the old Digi bee adapter boards will definitely cause problems, since there are different pinouts for the 2 cell modules, as well as different supply voltages provided to the pins, which could damage the sim7080 bee.  Also note that upgrading a Mayfly board from a Digi cell board to an EnviroDIY sim7080 bee board also requires a different logger sketch to be uploaded to the Mayfly board, since the commands for cell module libraries are different.  Examples of sketches for both the Digi boards and the EnviroDIY sim7080 LTE boards are available in our ModularSensors github repo.

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