Components and supplies
Arduino UNO
Adafruit PowerBoost Charger Shield
Rechargeable Lipoly battery (generic)
Project description
Comments
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Anonymous user
2 years ago
Very nice and useful project. If you want to reduce consumption, consider the following : - drop the Arduino UNO board, go for at least a Nano - consider some 3V3 powered derivative (like JeeNode) - look at sleep capabilities of the 368. They are impressive.
Anonymous user
2 years ago
Nice job! I'm also trying to battery power my Arduino project for a longer time, and also solar charge my batteries. It's still under development. Check it out: https://www.hackster.io/igorF2/solar-charged-battery-powered-arduino-uno-645d89
Anonymous user
2 years ago
I forgot to add that the data sheets for my micro's (Atmel) advise throwing the first conversion away (from the ADC) as it's doing some kind of a 'setup' the first time you enable a conversion (also takes longer.) Don't remember the details that exactly, but I realized I forgot to add this.. I think this explains why your first conversion appears flaky. Jack
Anonymous user
8 years ago
Very nice and useful project. If you want to reduce consumption, consider the following : - drop the Arduino UNO board, go for at least a Nano - consider some 3V3 powered derivative (like JeeNode) - look at sleep capabilities of the 368. They are impressive.
Anonymous user
8 years ago
You can tell pretty easily if it's picking stuff up. If you can watch the output numbers and you move you hand near it, you induce many different frequencies to the system. Many commercial application make it pass through a low pass filter, which is sort of what the cap is partially doing. Since all you want is DC, a low pass filter helps a lot. In my suggestion, I try and use software where possible to replace hardware. Software doesn't break... ;P
Anonymous user
8 years ago
I forgot to add that the data sheets for my micro's (Atmel) advise throwing the first conversion away (from the ADC) as it's doing some kind of a 'setup' the first time you enable a conversion (also takes longer.) Don't remember the details that exactly, but I realized I forgot to add this.. I think this explains why your first conversion appears flaky. Jack
Anonymous user
8 years ago
Neat, I like the simple ones.. It would be nice to show a schematic instead of an image of a wired board. I noticed you did not show a detailed picture of the power on/off circuit. Difficult to follow otherwise. I did have a couple of useful (I hope comments). I use the ADC on the Atmel devices a lot. Usually to adjust a display to ambient light and almost off in the dark. I've used this on the ATmega328p & the ATtiny13 controllers. The problem with you getting a highly varying value in your ADC can usually be attributed to the fact that the input to the ADC is a high impedance (greater than 10K, according to Atmel.) If you have any kind of leads (like you do) you will pick up noise and other EMF caused problems. Atmel suggests when you use the ADC's that you route all wiring away from the digital lines, since they induce a fluctuation in the applied voltage as does your hand from the mains frequencies. The capacitor that you put in (I have a bunch of like capacitance that I use) now makes the circuit have to take time to charge and discharge the capacitor, which makes the readings more 'stable'. The simple approach is to just keep a running average and load that value. I use an averaging period of a little over two minutes along with the capacitor and it seems to work pretty well. Some more details on the ADC is in the datasheet and describes how the noise from the CPU can cause problems. On the micros I use, you can turn off the CPU while the ADC figures out the results. Another noise area and high current draw is when you leave pins in an unknown state. Atmel suggests that the unused pins (not used as output) should have the internal pull ups enabled. Tying them to ground or Vcc is not suggested as you can damage the device by changing an input or output pin via software. Since most of them source or sink current, tying them up or down could damage them very easily by a simple software error. Of course none of us do that... Thanks for hearing me out... Jack :O
craic
2 years ago
Jack Thanks for the comments about the ADC - I'll try these out - I think the breadboard leads are a big part of the problem - when I wired it all onto a Protoshield the variation was greatly reduced but I'll take your advice on the pullups. I do have a schematic for the power up/power down circuit - did you check out the github page ? https://github.com/craic/arduino_power/blob/master/PowerOnPowerOff.md The Arduino/Hackster project page lets you 'import' a github page, which is what I did but it doesn't keep it's version updated with respect to the github repo. I've added a few things since then. I will have to see if/how I can copy those changes. Thanks again --Rob Jones
Anonymous user
8 years ago
Nice job! I'm also trying to battery power my Arduino project for a longer time, and also solar charge my batteries. It's still under development. Check it out: https://www.hackster.io/igorF2/solar-charged-battery-powered-arduino-uno-645d89
Anonymous user
2 years ago
You can tell pretty easily if it's picking stuff up. If you can watch the output numbers and you move you hand near it, you induce many different frequencies to the system. Many commercial application make it pass through a low pass filter, which is sort of what the cap is partially doing. Since all you want is DC, a low pass filter helps a lot. In my suggestion, I try and use software where possible to replace hardware. Software doesn't break... ;P