Battery for mesh nodes

Connectivity BLE // NFC
1

I ordered a dozen mesh nodes, and I’m very excited about them! I want to drive some of them from batteries and have some questions.

  1. Do I need 3.7V batteries?
  2. What capacity should I look for if I want to make temperature measurements and send them to the cloud on a hourly basis for a year without recharging?
  3. How can I recharge the batteries? Simply recharge them via the mesh nodes while also connecting a USB charger to the nodes?
2

The Particle Mesh boards use 3.7V batteries just like other Feather boards.

A good source of 3.7V batteries is Adafruit.

I think you can just leave the battery connected to the mesh board and plug in a USB to recharge the battery.

I’m not sure exactly what capacity you would need to send readings at that frequency for that long.

1 Like
3

That's ambitious :wink:
The mesh devices are intended to run much lower power than the current Particle devices, but a year of hourly waking without recharging may be challenging - also consider self-discharge of the LiPo in a year.
But to answer a bit more, we'd need to learn a bit more about your use-case.

  • What sensor?
  • What kind of uplink?
  • How are the nodes linked?
  • Does each node feater its own uplink?
  • How long will the devices be awake each time?

However the answers to that, having empiric data usually beats even well educated guesses.

4 Likes
4

@nrobinson2000 Thank you for your answer! I think this is pretty much all I needed to know right now. Ordered two 1200mAh lipos.

@ScruffR I’ll use an MCP9808 with a Xenon. Not sure about the final network topology. The nodes will send the payload to InfluxDB databases. I don’t really insist to a one year uptime without charging after all, so I’ll see. :slight_smile:

1 Like