Can the Enviro Weather (Pico W Aboard) - Weather Station Kit be powered via the USB port using a USB power bank?
I have my weather kit connected to a power bank which is in turn connected to a solar panel which keeps the power bank charged.
The problem is that the data is only uploaded when the weather station is initially powered on, it only uploads once and then doesn’t seem to upload again until the station is reset.(powered off and on again). It is configured to upload every 15 mins and when I use the battery holder provided with the kit it seems to work OK, except the batteries don’t last long
I am wondering if when powered via the USB port the board thinks its connected to a computer and will not upload the data.
Any advice our suggestions will be greatly appriciated.
As long as your board has power on the usb it doesn’t fully sleep but as long as the Wi-Fi connection is there the RTC will wake, sync time and upload. I’ve had mine connected to a pc for hours and it uploads as should.
I have an issue with powering the Enviro Weather (Pico W Aboard); I bought a solar panel and a battery pack to run the board, but it seems as if the wind sensors and/or rainfall sensor draws a lot of power (much more than the board by itself). The battery pack would run the board for t3+ days without the rain/wind sensors attached. With them attached the battery pack doesn’t make it overnight! And it doesn’t wake up when the power is restored (via the solar panel).
Anyone else had this issue?
A lot of people have problems with power-banks in combination with microcontrollers. This is because power-banks are optimized for charging at a relative high current other batteries, e.g. within a smartphone. The electronics of the power-bank usually shuts down the output-power if current draw is below a threshold. This happens when the battery of the smartphone is full. So this makes sense in the target context for power-banks.
The Pico like any other MCU draws very little current, so in combination with a power-bank you run into this kind of problem. Pimoroni sells a special power-bank where this behavior is configurable. This might be an option for you. Otherwise, I advice to switch from a power-bank to normal LiPos.
An update to my ‘power’ problem. For reference the pico is being powered from a LiPo, charged from a solar panel. I tried it running on my desk and it runs for days off the battery. Put it outside again and it ran for a couple of days and then in the early hours of the morning it stopped working. A review of the log doesn’t enlighten me - the log just stops with no error message. But, there was power available.
However when I brought it inside I could not connect to it via USB using Thonny. Just didn’t seem to see it. The on-board LED was on all the time - resetting the board had no effect.
In the end I had to power down the board and upon restart it started working.
Is this likely to be a power issue (it always seems to occur in the early hours of the morning) or are there some known issues with the software which causes it to hang?
Could you please add some more information about your setup. How do you connect your components (solar-charger, LiPo, Pico, desktop/USB)? What does “there was power available” mean?