CubeCell Potential Issues Sleep Power and Settings Use

#1

Hi Heltec staff,

I would like first to say that the CubeCell EU868 works well.

I do though have some question and potential Issues, that I would like comments on. This will help myself but also for others using the product. I hope this is constructive.

  1. You can use the AT Commands to enter the LoRaWAN keys this work well. But you lose the keys, if you load back the code after a change, this can be very annoying while developing code.

  2. If you want to turn off AT_SUPPORT 0, you cannot load the keys! So the I have had to change the default keys in Commissiong.h , so can turn off the AT support mode. Is there another way to do this?

  3. The Neo Pixel display is on all the time! either connected to USB or via battery only. I have tried to set LoraWan_RGB 0 or 1 but makes no difference. How do you turn off the Neo Pixel display.

  4. How can you control the Tx power Level, to make sure that with an antenna the power level does not exceed the local legal limit. Can you alter it in one of the files if so please give name of file.

  5. The lowest I can get the standby sleep current is either 19.8 µA on USB or 21.6µA on Battery only. This is with AT_Support 0, No Confirm Message, No ADR. How do you get the level to be 3.2 µA? Please advise how you have configured the unit to meet this level.

Many Thanks for your help

Simon Collins

CubeCell Power Consumption
#2

Hello Simon:
I am very happy to hear the good news of CubeCell’s working well. thank you for your valuable suggestions.
Regarding your questions and suggestions:
About 1. 2. There are currently no other more ideal methods. Do you have any better suggestions?

About 3. Turning off Neo Poxel requires changing LoRaWAN_RGB to DEACTIVE in theTools tab of the Arduino IDE.

About 4. The default TX power can be changed in the \ASR650x-Arduino\libraries\LoRa\src\LoRa_APP.cpp file.

uint8_t Lora_TXPW = 10;

If the node is working on LoRaWAN, you only need to select the regional band.

About 5. Regarding low power consumption, different CubeCell boards (Capsule or Board) have different low power performance. When the battery is connected, because the LDO chip and the battery chip need to operate on the board, taking Capsule as an example, the low power consumption when connecting the battery is around 20uA.
So you will get 3.5uA when powered by VDD (3.3V).
At the same time, the low-power performance is also related to the load device. Please confirm that the power of the load part is turned off when entering the sleep mode.

best regards.

2 Likes
#3

does the AR650x have an eeprom or any other non volatile memory that we can use to store the keys?

1 Like
#4

Hi:
You can use the first three rows of sflash. There is some serial number for verification in the fourth row, please do not change it.
You can also use Flash 510 row before, but it may affect the content, please don’t go too far.

#5

can you give me an example how to store a uint16_t variable in the sflash?
i would like to store the baseline value of an CCS811 Sensor.

#6

I’m sorry it took a long time to reply to your message. For quite some time I was assigned to work on other matters.
There is a complete example of the flash operation method of cubecell. Please refer to:

Apologies to you again and sincerely thank you for your contribution to the forum.:+1:

1 Like
#7

no prob, found out by my self.
it is all in the LoRaWan_MultiSensor example.
there the baseline for the CCS811 sensor is saved and read back

1 Like
#8

Hey @Saber, one quick question – in this example you take Row 0 and then write 512 bytes. Each row is 256 bytes, so does this example write Row 0 and Row 1? So I could extend this to write up to 768 bytes safely?

Just asking as I wasn’t sure if each row needs the offset (100) or not. I suspect not but I’d rather not overwrite something important accidentally.

Thanks!