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ble !!
solar power !!
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The ultimate test of the low energy consumption is a sensor that can survive on its own, without maintenance. My Android weather station supported by BLE weather sensors has been functioning for more than a year but this year has not passed without adventures in the battery front. First the station was powered by 2 AA NiMh batteries - that was 2 weeks of lifetime. Then came the motorcycle battery, that took much longer to expire but eventually the battery itself failed. Now the 2 sensors run on a discarded laptop battery which may not be able to power a laptop but powers nicely the two sensors with their combined 5 mA consumption.
5 mA, however, is a lot so when I found this solar-powered lamp at Jysk, I immediately realized that I had to turn the lamp into the solar-powered version of this weather sensor. Why another weather sensor? Because I wanted to concentrate on the solar-powering aspects and wanted to reuse as much as possible from the old sensor. This prototype may serve as a template, however, for different kind of sensors too.
Let's see first the solar lamp that I used as a base.
Solar lamp already containing the weather sensor. The two red LEDs indicate that the solar cell is charging the battery.
This is a quite cheap device with a solar cell on top and a circuit built around the XD5252F LED driver that takes care of everything from the charging of the small NiMh battery (if there's sunlight) to switching on the LED (if there's darkness). Unfortunately the circuit is so specialized to solar LED lamps that I could not reuse too much of it except for the solar panel and the LED itself. The solar panel is not very high-powered, it is a 2V, 20 mA cell. So it became clear immediately that the Android client app has to work more (consuming more energy) to obtain sensor data while the sensor has to sleep more to conserve its own battery that charges only very slowly from the low-powered solar cell. Also, surviving the night (or longer periods without sufficiently strong sunlight) requires a quite beefy battery in the sensor if we want it to transmit BLE messages to the Android application frequently enough.
Click here to download the sources of the Android application. Read this post to figure out, how to create an Android Studio project from the downloaded sources.
The previous Android app has been therefore changed so that instead of 15 seconds of scanning, it now scans for 70 seconds. The sensor sleeps 60 seconds then transmits the measurements for 5 seconds. This results in a quite low, 4 mAh energy consumption daily that even the low-powered solar cell can refill if sunny periods occur time to time. To make sure that the sensor survives long without enough sunlight, a 2700 mAh Li-Ion battery was installed (of the 14500 type, with the AA form factor). As in the previous version, the measurement data is transmitted in the BLE advertisement packets. I wanted to transmit battery indicator in this case too so I dropped one byte from the 8-byte long station ID (so it is now 7 bytes long) and instead of that byte now the supply voltage of the microcontroller is transmitted. It is generally 3.3V, if it drops below that then the battery is really not charging. This additional measurement data required that the sensor's UUID be changed, that's how the Android app recognizes this new parameter and displays in a graph.
Battery indicator in the measurement screen of the new sensor
The schematics of the sensor can be seen below (click to enlarge).
Sensor circuit installed into the solar lamp case
Nothing much changed from the previous version, except for the solar cell-battery charger power chain. I wanted to save myself the pain of designing a Li-Ion charger so I used building block already avalable: this DC-DC converter to produce 5V from the solar cell's varying output voltage and this battery charger circuit to take care of the Li-Ion battery. The result is a less than optimal efficiency (almost 50% of the solar cell's energy is lost during the different up-down conversions) but at least it is easy to reproduce. And if you like the sensor, you can always design a much better charging circuit. :-)
Click here to download the nRF51822 sources. Read this blog post for compilation instructions.
The nRF51822 microcontroller application has not changed a lot either. The most serious modification is the way the delays are implemented, now the sleeping periods between two measurements are implemented in a very low-power way and that results in a consumption in the inactive periods of about 100 microamperes.
And one thing more! Check out my low-cost robot project!
5 mA, however, is a lot so when I found this solar-powered lamp at Jysk, I immediately realized that I had to turn the lamp into the solar-powered version of this weather sensor. Why another weather sensor? Because I wanted to concentrate on the solar-powering aspects and wanted to reuse as much as possible from the old sensor. This prototype may serve as a template, however, for different kind of sensors too.
Let's see first the solar lamp that I used as a base.
Solar lamp already containing the weather sensor. The two red LEDs indicate that the solar cell is charging the battery.
This is a quite cheap device with a solar cell on top and a circuit built around the XD5252F LED driver that takes care of everything from the charging of the small NiMh battery (if there's sunlight) to switching on the LED (if there's darkness). Unfortunately the circuit is so specialized to solar LED lamps that I could not reuse too much of it except for the solar panel and the LED itself. The solar panel is not very high-powered, it is a 2V, 20 mA cell. So it became clear immediately that the Android client app has to work more (consuming more energy) to obtain sensor data while the sensor has to sleep more to conserve its own battery that charges only very slowly from the low-powered solar cell. Also, surviving the night (or longer periods without sufficiently strong sunlight) requires a quite beefy battery in the sensor if we want it to transmit BLE messages to the Android application frequently enough.
Click here to download the sources of the Android application. Read this post to figure out, how to create an Android Studio project from the downloaded sources.
The previous Android app has been therefore changed so that instead of 15 seconds of scanning, it now scans for 70 seconds. The sensor sleeps 60 seconds then transmits the measurements for 5 seconds. This results in a quite low, 4 mAh energy consumption daily that even the low-powered solar cell can refill if sunny periods occur time to time. To make sure that the sensor survives long without enough sunlight, a 2700 mAh Li-Ion battery was installed (of the 14500 type, with the AA form factor). As in the previous version, the measurement data is transmitted in the BLE advertisement packets. I wanted to transmit battery indicator in this case too so I dropped one byte from the 8-byte long station ID (so it is now 7 bytes long) and instead of that byte now the supply voltage of the microcontroller is transmitted. It is generally 3.3V, if it drops below that then the battery is really not charging. This additional measurement data required that the sensor's UUID be changed, that's how the Android app recognizes this new parameter and displays in a graph.
Battery indicator in the measurement screen of the new sensor
The schematics of the sensor can be seen below (click to enlarge).
Sensor circuit installed into the solar lamp case
Nothing much changed from the previous version, except for the solar cell-battery charger power chain. I wanted to save myself the pain of designing a Li-Ion charger so I used building block already avalable: this DC-DC converter to produce 5V from the solar cell's varying output voltage and this battery charger circuit to take care of the Li-Ion battery. The result is a less than optimal efficiency (almost 50% of the solar cell's energy is lost during the different up-down conversions) but at least it is easy to reproduce. And if you like the sensor, you can always design a much better charging circuit. :-)
Click here to download the nRF51822 sources. Read this blog post for compilation instructions.
The nRF51822 microcontroller application has not changed a lot either. The most serious modification is the way the delays are implemented, now the sleeping periods between two measurements are implemented in a very low-power way and that results in a consumption in the inactive periods of about 100 microamperes.
And one thing more! Check out my low-cost robot project!
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