Best Board Series to use for Solar Powered Sensors

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DaveAZ
 
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Best Board Series to use for Solar Powered Sensors

Post by DaveAZ »

I'm working with a group of students to deploy some solar powered sensors that will initially just log data to an SD card but will eventually send readings of a LoRa link. I'd prefer to use CircuitPython but I could use Arduino code for this project (the students have had some experience with each language).

In order to run on solar throughout the year, my plan is to have the board/circuit wake up every 5 min or more to record readings to the SD card and send data of LoRa. I'd like to use fairly small a solar cell. I currently have a the Adafruit 6V 2W Solar Panel - ETFE panel to experiment with.

Are there boards/processors that support very low power sleep modes that you'd recommend for this. I've read about the ESP32 as supporting deep sleep using Circuit Python and perhaps the 2040 processor does as well.

We have some ItsyBitsy M4 boards, would those work reasonably well for this application?

Is there a resource somewhere that documents the sleep & deep sleep support for various Adafruit boards? As I said, if some have good support in Arduino libraries but not in CircuitPython, that would also be an option.

Thanks,
Dave

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mikeysklar
 
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Joined: Mon Aug 01, 2016 8:10 pm

Re: Best Board Series to use for Solar Powered Sensors

Post by mikeysklar »

The ESP32-S2 based boards have a good deep sleep, but if you are using LORA and not WiFi they probably not the best choice.

https://learn.adafruit.com/deep-sleep-w ... onsumption

The RP2040 with is less than 2mA deep sleep would be a great selection.

https://learn.adafruit.com/deep-sleep-w ... her-boards

I think the Feather M4 is limited to sleepy dog so not an ideal choice for super low power.

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