@sundberg84 I'll also take a look at your pcb. I was trying to achieve a pcb like that. A generic one to use with various sensors. I Was hoping to do it myself for the sake of learning. But I may have change tact.
FatBeard
@FatBeard
Best posts made by FatBeard
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
Latest posts made by FatBeard
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
@gohan between positive end of one of the two aa batteries and where it enters circuit. If I start off by having battery connected, the release it slowly with the multimeter attached and without breaking circuit I get my 6ua. However after the timer runs out and the radio comes back on I'm stuck at 1ma. The radio at that point doesn't want to work and it doesn't return to 6ua
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
@sundberg84 @gohan. Apologies , that's a typo on my part. It jumps to 1ma do 60ms from 6ua. Which I'm happy with I think. My question was more how I can measure it properly. The multimeter seems to be effecting the circuit.
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
@sundberg84 Thanks Sunberg, pretty much sorted now. It was the sensor, i changed libraries and it solved my problem. In theory i was using the forced read with both, but only the sparkfun bme280 library worked in reducing the power. To the best of my knowledge, i'm now running at 6ua most of the time with a 60ms (i timed from beginning to end of the loop method) jump to 1amp every three minutes to get a reading. It's difficult for me to capture the amps properly as when i put my uni-t digital multimeter into the circuit, the nrf stops working. Any thoughts on why that might be?
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
@sundberg84 To give you an update. I've changed from a dht22 sensor to a bme280 i2c sensor. The sensor is running off a4 and 5 and power is gotten directory from 2aa batteries. My original problem is gone in that it's working fine as a mysensors node. My issue though is when in sleep mode, i'm running at 1ma, when i would expect to be down in the low ua area. Any thoughts? The code i'm using is based off of this thread: https://forum.mysensors.org/topic/3816/bme280-temp-humidity-pressure-sensor/5
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
@sundberg84 I'll also take a look at your pcb. I was trying to achieve a pcb like that. A generic one to use with various sensors. I Was hoping to do it myself for the sake of learning. But I may have change tact.
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
I've actually ordered some bme280s which I'm waiting on, I think they will work down to low voltages too. So hopefully that will sort this issue by not needing the step up.
I would like to still to be able to figure out this problem though. I tried removing the dht22 completely to see if it was contributing to the problem, no luck. I've tried various capacitors over the ground and vout to no avail.
How would I go about analysing noise on the circuit?
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
Thats for the response guys. So tried connecting directly to the battery. I cut the trace on the pcb, then soldered a wire directly from the vIn to the positive leg of the 4.7u cap that leads to the radio. No joy though. Still same problem.
To the point about disabling bod, i have done that already, my issue with that setup though is that my dht22 seems to give inconsistent measurements when operating. It would give readings a degree apart every 5 minutes when the temperature would have remained a lot more stable. I assumed this to be due to the 2x batteries running at just a tad below 3v, while the dht22 is rated at 3.3v. Hence i thought the stepup would fix this problem.
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
@sundberg84 Ok, thanks guys. I'll try your suggestions out tonight. I would have preferred to do it through the step up to get the most out of the batteries but maybe this is not practical.
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
Any thoughts on what I could do to fix the issue permanently without the multimeter?
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RE: 💬 Battery Powered Sensors
I made progress. So the capacitor idea doesn't seem to work. However rozpruwacz suggested measuring the current which I did. I disconnected the negative wire and put my multimeter in between the negative from the battery and the ground pin on the step up module. I measured 72ma when the device powers up, then it runs at .16ma when in sleep mode. But here is the thing, in this configuration, mysensors worked as a thermometer. I got humidity and temperature readings from the sensor to my mqtt server through the gateway over the nrfs. When I removed the multimeter again from the equation it stopped working. Surely this would hint at what the problem is for someone more familiar with electronics than myself?