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gereic / GXAirCom

Multifunctional, compatible DIY aviation proximity awareness, variometer and messaging system with FANET+, FLARM and OGN support.
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Feature Request: Repeater feature #118

Closed Xen01r closed 1 year ago

Xen01r commented 1 year ago

Hello,

I would like to deploy a ground station on a hill next to my house where there is no internet connection and no electricity. If I could placed an autonomous (solar powered) repeater on this hill and a ground station at my home it would be perfect.

Would it be possible with the current project ?

gereic commented 1 year ago

Hi, You can do that already.

  1. install a normal solar powered ground-station on the hill.
  2. install a ground-station at your home.
  3. adjust the settins at you home-ground-station, that it forward all weather-data to WU or WI.

thats all.

Xen01r commented 1 year ago

Perfect ! Do you know what hardware should I use to minimize power consumption on the repeater side ?

I saw here that some work has already be done on solar powered hardware. If I understood it well, it use a Lilygo TTGO T-Sim7000G Module which can connect to cellphone network via a SIM card and a Lilygo Lora 868Mhz Shield to connect to the LoRa network. That's not really what I wanted to do but it could also work !

gereic commented 1 year ago

You can use a simple T-Beam and a solar-charger (TP4056). Then you solder all wires directly to the board and it should work out of the box. The wiring, you see in the readme.txt in bin-folder.

Xen01r commented 1 year ago

I'm doing some measurements of current consumption right now on the T-Beam V1.1 with 18650 battery attached to it. I thought it could be useful for others people.

GXAirComONOFF_current (a) Charging current of the 18650 battery (b) battery + T-beam V1.1 consumption.

Xen01r commented 1 year ago

I try to optimize the current consumption of the T-beam V1.1 in ground station mode. I noticed that the CPU frequency plays a major role in consumption. By changing the default CPU frequency (240MHz) to 40MHz I save 30% of consumption (from 130mA to 90mA). Could you tell me what are the consequences of lowering the CPU frequency in ground station mode ?