One way to get through the winter doldrums is to take notice of the minuscule positive changes in weather as spring approaches. Although much of the US is experiencing a particularly warm month, that’s not the case in Germany where [rsappiawf] resides. Even so, they are having a good time charting the weather on their new solar-powered E-ink weather station.
And in spite of the dark winter days, the device has been delivering weather updates for over a week on solar power alone. The brains of this operation is an ESP32 S3 Mini, which [rsappiawf] operated on a little bit. For starters, they removed the integrated RGB LED in order to save precious milliamps. Then they upgraded the voltage regulator to a TPS73733DCQR.
[rsappiawf] also has a TPL5110 power timer breakout module in the mix, which saves even more power by only turning on every once in a while according to the potentiometer setting, and only then turning on the project’s power. Check out the brief demo after the break, including the cool sliding action into the 3D-printed holder.
There’s a lot you can do to lower power consumption in a project like this. Here’s one that will go 60 days on a charge.
Nice project, but the glass behind it is already doing an excellent job telling you if it’s raining with minimal power requirements.
Rather like the old “hillbilly” weather station joke:
https://www.pinterest.de/pin/520869513166369559/
Windows wont give you an estimation if it’ll rain tomorrow though and don’t tell you the temperature/wind speed/direction/etc …
>wind speed
If the window or parts of it flies around you the wind is too strong.
Nice project!
However, the thing with weather: Tomorrow’s weather is almost always the same as today. A sort of simple moving average will do…
I don’t have the same tomorrow as you, I guess then.
Often todays weather isn’t the same as today.
This person doen’t live in Houston…
The ESP32 has an RTC that be be used for waking up the microcontroller from deep sleep, there was no need to use an extra TPL5110 power timer …
Depends if the esp32’s sleep current is higher or lower than the quiescent current of the tpl5110. Not all sleep current draws are the same.
why not add mesh (meshtastic, reticullum KISS, mesh now esp etc.)