Optimizing electron battery life

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I’m Using an Electron to track the temperature inside a truck box. I could not connect to AC because it’s a refrigerated box and I could not modify any part of the box.

I use 2 dallas sensors to read the temperature every 15 minutes, after I create a Json that has been sent to particle with all the info. After this, I deepsleep the machine.

The problem is the battery life, I’m using a 3,7v 6000mAh and the duration was only a week.

Is it possible to save energy, or increase the battery power, or increase the performance?

Thank’s

Eduard

2
  1. You can consider using a beefier Li-ion battery
  2. Using an external battery bank, something like 20,000mAh is common. This will require hooking up to the microUSB port
3

Hi,

Is it possible to store the data in a SD card and send the information every hour?

To safe power consumption

Thank’s

Eduard

4

but it’s extremely heavy, I saw a guy with a sigfox element, one temp sensor and a 2 batteries AA. He told me that could be 1 year without recharge bats :-s

5

@ecabanas, with deep sleep, the cellular subsystem is turned off entirely. So when the Electron wakes, it needs to renegotiate the connection to the nearest tower if the device is mobile. This can take time and consume a lot of power. If the device is mobile, even using STOP mode with SLEEP_NETWORK_STANDBY may not be worthwhile. The best solution may be @kennethlimcp’s suggestion of a larger battery.

1 Like
6

How about adding a solar panel to the truck to charge the Electron battery during the day?

Can you add a small solar panel to the outside or inside near the window of the truck?

7

Hi RWB and thank's for your reply

No I can not do anything inside the box, there is a light but by contract I could not modify the box.

I was imagining to record the data in a SD Card, and every hour send the info to particle, but I have no idea how to do it.

8

If your just logging temp data then you should not need an SD card, you should be able to store data in an array on the Electron without much trouble and then send that data later. Somebody else on here should be able to help get that setup.

9

Anyone know when Particle will release LTE CAT M1 modules? That’d give you huge power savings on your platform. @ecabanas