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Another look at battery discharge curves...​

A project log for The Cave Pearl Project

Creating a generic data logging platform that is easy to build & modify for many different environmental monitoring projects.

ed-mallonEd Mallon 01/20/2016 at 16:463 Comments

Sensor failures almost always show up as a hit on the battery discharge curve, but there are plenty of other things that show up on the graph for loggers that are still working: Another look at battery discharge curves...

I will add more of these plots to the post as I come across them, since I haven't found many other sources discussing these sorts of 'non lethal' performance issues.

Discussions

Jarrett wrote 01/20/2016 at 20:46 point

You don't need to enclose the testbed, so I'd recommend turning on easy mode - Pick up a uCurrent or two.

http://eevblog.myshopify.com/products/ucurrent

There's an internal battery, so it won't affect your measurements (or hook it up to an external benchtop power supply to run for months)

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Ed Mallon wrote 01/20/2016 at 19:24 point

I have though about it, but I don't really know how to measure current that vary from a few μA to 100 mA with the Arduino (ie the difference between sleeping and waking SD cards).  There is this post over at Dorkbot: http://www.dorkbotpdx.org/blog/paul/measuring_microamps_milliamps_at_3_mhz_bandwidth

but building a logger based on that method will require a chunk of time. Are there any nice I2C μA range sensor boards out there that would let me cobble something together quickly?

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Jarrett wrote 01/20/2016 at 17:52 point

I'd recommend building a test logger that does nothing but measure the current draws of all of the devices and logs them to the SD card. Assuming you get similar anomalous data from the test rig, you should have complementary data that characterises the current draw from the SD card, Arduino, overall current being drawn from the battery, etc.

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