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pimoroni / enviro

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Best way to run Enviro Indoor offline? #204

Open Sylvanoe1 opened 8 months ago

Sylvanoe1 commented 8 months ago

I'm trying to monitor the temperature with Enviro Indoor in a remote location without wifi. Therefore relying on RTC for triggering the measure and saving the data locally. How should I adapt the scripts to make it running wifi-free (and the longest possible)?

sjefferson99 commented 8 months ago

The intended operation was for low frequency polling with the option to rarely or never upload the findings.

Referring to the getting started guide: If you provision the device using the web based wizard and reduce reading frequency as low as you can go for your needs this will save the most battery power.

The device will store readings locally if it fails to upload, but I am unsure (as I have the opposite use case and have not set it up this way myself) whether that is achieved by setting no upload frequency, or no upload destination, but the guide seems to suggest it's set in the upload destination page. Document your experience here and the documentation or provisioning wizard could always be improved as a result.

As the wifi is the most power hungry device by some margin on the indoor board, this should be all you need to do to get the best results.

Alternatively if it's indoors, it might be there is solar or mains or a larger battery available (car/leisure battery). You can drive the board directly from USB and this should work in newer firmware just fine. There is a bit more of a temperature offset evidenced from running permanently, especially through USB instead of the battery port, so I would recommend inlining a simple lipo charger and lipo battery, which is how I run it.

Sylvanoe1 commented 7 months ago

Thanks for your answer! I've been provisioning the Enviro also - sort of - this way: store the data locally and low frequency (180min) for measuring. But apparently, it still needs to be set first on wifi for getting the RTC right, then unplug it... theoretically it should keep measuring after by itself... which is not yet the case for some reasons... not entirely sure how to make it totally connexion-free yet.