Anyone out there doing anything with bin monitoring. I have tried a couple different routes but have not been able to get anything reliable to run without problems.
I’ve used these guys and an adafruit feather connected to my LoRa gateway. They can sit in salt water for years kind of tough. Very accurate.
I have never tried LoRa which are radios communicating on a 915 mhz band I think. So where is the temp data stored? are you running a server?
My current setup is I’m running a Blynk server on a raspberry pi and some nodemcu’s connected to my old OPI cable. I placed the nodemcu inside a solar garden light I converted to power it. The problem I’m having is that to conserve power I have it report temps every hour and then deep sleep, but for some reason under deep sleep the esp-8266 fails to wake up while powered by batteries even though I read power well over the 3.3 volts needed. I have tested this with the nodemcu connected and powered to my pc serial port and it won’t miss a beat.
This is why I was wondering if anyone else was doing something like this and had come accross similar issues I am, or maybe had come up with a better way to read the OPI cables.
yes the 915 mhz. The LoRa feather has the same issue with deep sleep, won;t wake up again randomly. I think the best solution is just have the solar cell charge the thing all the time and forego putting it in sleep. It will run a long time without sleep and no sun, and even a small solar cell will easily keep up
You might also look at the Heltec LORA units, power usage is supposed to be very low if you don’t enable the display.
Thanks this might be something to look at multiple communication possibilities for sure.
I had a arduino with a microchip RN2903 lora module, deep sleep the arduino and lora module then use the RN2903 timer to wake both up, seemed to work alright. Need to reboot every couple of months, but think that was a network issue
This topic has interested me quite a bit over the years. I have been trying the nodemcu to. With the blynks app. Has run faithfully for couple of years with only 1 temp sensor and couple relays for garage door openers. Tried it at another bin yard with a home made temp cable with 8 sensors but it didnt work for long. Now I tried with a d1 mini and it has been working good now for a few days. But they have to be plugged in all the time. I like the idea of LoRa but another learning curve.
I also have one bin at home where I’m using what SK21 has on github. Works good but have to restart my router once in awhile so it reconnects. Never have had to reset the bin mini d1 though.
My LoRa gateway ran for a few months no problem, we had a big power bump and bam, the memory card corrupted. A common problem with the RPI. i’ve seen guys putting on hard drives - but ya, more learning and hours digging into cryptic instructions.
Gonna have to build a small ups for the RPI, that should help
I think you could almost build into the code a continual reset for Lora’s and nodes etc. assuming they can run an hour till the next reset lol
Yeah micro SD cards are prone to corruption anyway, and to run a live Linux system off one is going lead to corruption eventually. One mitigation is to make as much of the system read-only as possible, using a ram disk for scratch stuff (/tmp). I think the Armbian distribution supports some kind of read-only mode. In practice I’ve never used that, as it’s too much of a pain when trying to update things, or just do some development.
do you think the hardrive is a viable option?