[Tuesday: 3.4 miles, Thursday: 4.0 miles]<\/p>\n
Our solar powered weather stations in Starkville and Columbus are starting to get into some trouble.<\/p>\n
We have had a very cloudy winter and the days are short.\u00a0 The solar panel is not able to keep the battery charged up.<\/p>\n
The beaglebone computer runs on 5 volts and the weather station gizmo runs on even less than that.\u00a0 The solar panel charges at 12+ volts and the battery is a 12 volt gel cel.<\/p>\n
The weather gizmo gives us a reading of the voltage it sees, straight from the battery.\u00a0 And we have been dipping down well below 11 volts.\u00a0 That’s not good.\u00a0 I don’t know if the battery will recover from something like that.\u00a0 It may not.\u00a0 If that’s the case, time for a new battery.<\/p>\n
It would be nice to have a bigger solar panel or a bigger battery.\u00a0 It seems that our energy load is just more than we can get from the current system.<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking about ways of trying to cut the load.\u00a0 Maybe we could turn off the usb\/wifi thing and just turn it on to do the data upload?\u00a0 I don’t know if that would work.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[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.\u00a0 The solar panel is not able to keep the battery charged up. The beaglebone computer runs on 5 volts and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4675,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4674\/revisions\/4675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}