This Project is about a sensor Platform for our Weekendhome. Since it is a onehour drive it would be nice to have Information about the weather before going there. At that place there is no Powerline, and no Internet or Wifi. That means it needs a way to store and generate energy - in the first version a small Solarpanel should charge a single liion cell. For communication a SIM800 module will provide a slow connection to the internet. The name Gaia 9 is named after the moon lander Luna 9 and will be hopefully exced the 3 days Luna 9 survived.
- The Brain of the Project will be a Raspberry Pi Pico running CircuitPython.
- For the first Version i will be using a BME280 for monitoring the air pressure, inside Temperature and Humidity.
- A second Temperature Sensor monitoring the outside Air temperature is not specified yet (i was thinking about a DHT22, but when i started it was not supported by CP)
- Future Sensor Options also include a Brightnes sensor.
- For communication i am using a SIM800L module that transmits to my webserver.
- On the webserver side there is a PHP file that gets the Variables from the URL and apend them to a file (maybe write them to a database in the future) also the timestamp for the datapoints is generated on the PHP Server eliminating the need for an RTC on the board
I didnt draw any schematics yet since everything is quite straight forward
- Circuit Python support for the Pico is not full featured yet, there are still some quite important modules missing!
- UART Support was added since i started my project so no problem anymore
- I had to do some edits in the phona library so it get the module working. also there is no command for the sleepmodes of the module, maybe i consider cutting the power to the module while not in use!
- pulsein lib is not supported yet (in the nightly builds its allready available) so most singlewire sensora are not possible yet.
- one of the biggest problems is the "alarm" library that is used for puting the Pico in deepsleep is not available yet! also i didnt see any traces of it in the github so a added a feature request.
- i did some estimation, without any optimisation i get an idle consumption of 40mA
- a full circle of collecting measurements and transmiting them takes about 100s and is using an average of 100mA
i also measured the pico without the GSM module it is about 20mA so i hope to improve that in the future with some sleepmodes! the other half of the Idle consumption is the 20mA from the gsm module, i hope to implement some kind of power down and power up for the modem!
for my test now i use a single liion cell with 2500mA - with the curent powerconsumption and new measurements every half hour it should last for about 2 days
- move URL to secrets so its not publicly available in github :D
- finish submission code
- create a loop that runns the code cyclic (i would prefer the code to be completly restartet)
- more powersaving
- error handling - code should not break if a sensor is not available anymore!
- change datastorage to SQL
- Public webpage Dataview with graphics
- api to get the messurements on my home Raspberry Pi
- get data into Grafana
- Telegram Bot