This fall my Measure Your City sensor hub fell out of a tree during a storm. It seemed to be damaged, so I put it aside until I could think how or when to reinstate it. Later on I noticed from the log files that it seemed to have stopped working before it fell from the tree but I did not think it important. A few weeks ago I handed the sensor hub in with the team of Measure Your City that does repairs. It turns out the sensor hub was fully functional except for …. the batteries.
The problem was the firmware using too much battery power. Which is problematic given the stated aim of these LoRa sensors, to work on low power for a long time.
With a firmware upgrade and fresh batteries, the sensor hub is now back in action. The past day I’ve used it to measure the relative humidity in various rooms around the house as we suspected it might be too dry (it was, around 30-35% humidity). As there are 2 similar sensor hubs nearby, we are not without info on current outside conditions. I’ll reinstate the sensor hub outside again this weekend.
Meanwhile my own sensor hub as well as the two others a street away, use my recently installed The Things Network gateway to transport the data to the Measure Your City back-end. The gateway also sees several other sensors sending data through the gateway, although I don’t know what type of sensors those are.
Screenshot of the data passing through the gateway. The device in the first line is my own sensor hub.
Reminds me of the time that a colleague at the publisher where I was working couldn’t figure out why the printer that they’d recently wired into a network in the next room wouldn’t print. They tried *everything* to get it to work, but without success. It turns out that rather than wiring it into the network, they’d wired it into the phone system.
In my experience, technical problems are almost always the fault of DNS. And if DNS isn’t at fault, it is, as you found, power.