[Tuesday: 3.4 miles, Thursday: 4.0 miles]
Our solar powered weather stations in Starkville and Columbus are starting to get into some trouble.
We have had a very cloudy winter and the days are short. The solar panel is not able to keep the battery charged up.
The beaglebone computer runs on 5 volts and the weather station gizmo runs on even less than that. The solar panel charges at 12+ volts and the battery is a 12 volt gel cel.
The weather gizmo gives us a reading of the voltage it sees, straight from the battery. And we have been dipping down well below 11 volts. That’s not good. I don’t know if the battery will recover from something like that. It may not. If that’s the case, time for a new battery.
It would be nice to have a bigger solar panel or a bigger battery. It seems that our energy load is just more than we can get from the current system.
I’ve been thinking about ways of trying to cut the load. Maybe we could turn off the usb/wifi thing and just turn it on to do the data upload? I don’t know if that would work.