Some new CubeCell products

#22

any cubecells in the works with gps and accelerometer (no OLED preferably)?

#23

Need more data on the solar voltage and amps . As solar version canā€™t even maintain the battery when in deep sleep.

#24

If itā€™s of any interest, my observations are purely empirical but I have a couple of applications that employ battery powered CubeCell Dev-Board Plus processors (effectively not using the OLED display) and are configured with solar panels to recharge the batteries. They transmit every 60 seconds and go into deep sleep between transmissions. The weather where I live is never overcast for more than four days in a row, and never heavily overcast for that long (the solar panels still charge when overcast, although they canā€™t keep the batteries fully charged under those conditions).

Under the above conditions, I have been able to keep the batteries (900mAH 14500 Li-Ion) fully charged with a 5V 50mA (60mm x 44mm) solar panel (allowing for a dip when the weather is overcast). A 5.5V 40mA (57mm x 28mm) solar panel could not keep a battery fully charged.

I did buy a couple of the little solar panels used on the CubeCell Capsule but, in my application at least, they were as good as useless.

#25

Thanks for that, I have now connected 6v 60mah solar cell and 850mah Lipo battery. And a 3D printed enclosure. Sampling voltage every 4 minutes. time awake 20 seconds. Txpower 1, 18 bytes,Speading factor 7. Typically itā€™s been cloudy today. Early test shows on an overcast day the cell barley maintaining , but not charging.So i suspect with no charging during the night the battery will eventually go low voltage. Although i donā€™t think i fully charged it from the beginning.

https://thingspeak.com/channels/1838276
Cell 3 is the unit with the 60mah solar 850mah
Cell 2 is an original solar cell and battery. This always dips and goes low power within 24hrs even with full sunshine.
They are both in my conservatory pointing at the sun mid afternoon. Shadded until 11am. so not an ideal location.
The gap in the data is where the TTgo lora I use to receive the data and wifi it to thingspeak. It loses internet connection and does not regain connection until after a 1hr reset timer trigger. (Need to work out why it loses internet.

#26

Are you sure your processor is getting into deep sleep?

Just for the record, the following are my LoRa configuration parameters, although Iā€™m not sure what difference any of these would make in the present situation:

#define RF_FREQUENCY                  917000000	// Hz
#define LORA_BANDWIDTH                0         // [0: 125 kHz,
                                                //  1: 250 kHz,
                                                //  2: 500 kHz,
                                                //  3: Reserved]
#define LORA_SPREADING_FACTOR         7         // [SF7..SF12]
#define LORA_CODINGRATE               1         // [1: 4/5,
                                                //  2: 4/6,
                                                //  3: 4/7,
                                                //  4: 4/8]
#define LORA_PREAMBLE_LENGTH          8         // Same for Tx and Rx

#define TX_OUTPUT_POWER               14        // dBm
#define LORA_SYMBOL_TIMEOUT           0         // Symbols
#define LORA_FIX_LENGTH_PAYLOAD_ON    false
#define LORA_IQ_INVERSION_ON          false

My nodes transmit an 18 byte battery status message, and a sensor status message thatā€™s somewhat more than that, every 60 sec.ā€”some sensors need sampling so that the ā€˜upā€™ time is around 5 seconds, followed by the 60 sec deep sleep period. That seems similar to your present arrangement. Itā€™s completely overcast here today, and itā€™s raining. In spite of that, the battery voltage on both of the Cubecell Plus nodes has remained steady all morning (5 hours)ā€”and they only lost 0.01V overnight.

#27

I have this little bit of test code in the loop that will flash the led if the cubecell does not sleep. within 20 passes
And it does not flash. So i am sure it is sleeping.
I do however use the RTC to use as a time reference to wake all my sensors at the same time.
So maybe it is sleeping but not fully?
I tried getting innerWdtEnable(true);
But never got this working so commented it out.
None of my cubecells ever recovered from a low voltage situation brownout. Most likely because they never regained any charge. Plugging them into a charge again, they also did not recover and wake. Only pressing the reset button would get them running again. So would be interested to know if yours ever woke from a brownout.As to have to out in the field to restart them will be a pain.
The 850mah battery may not have been fully charged from the start. So maybe the voltage drop would be quicker. Looking at the data the battery has fallen about 0.03Volts over night. So really need to have the sun come out to see a rise to full voltage and to note the battery voltage fluctuate as the charge circuit switches on and off. That way i know the battery has a full tank of energy. But yes disappointing so far. But at least it is still working. Unlike the original solar cubecell that went flat ages ago.

indent preformatted text by 4 spaces

case LOWPOWER:

  //innerWdtEnable(true);

  TestCounter++;

  if (TestCounter>20){ // more than 20 loops and lowpower failed

  turnOnRGB(0x000055,0);// Flash Led blue

  delay(2);

   turnOnRGB(0,0);

  TestCounter=0;

  }

  lowPowerHandler();

    break;