Today we hit five weeks of Project Curacao running in the warm and windy climate. The project has been fairly robust to this point. We lost one sensor last week. The light color sensor (BM017 / tsc3574) went dead and no longer responds to I2C requests although other sensors on the same bus do respond on the Raspberry Pi (UPDATE: the sensor came back from the dead in June 2014). No problems with the Arduino BatteryWatchdog yet.
Here’s an email that just camera in from the Project Curacao box telling me the environmental monitoring system has turned the fan on because of high temperatures inside the box (degrees C).
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From: projectcuracaopi@gmail.com Subject: ProjectCuracao Fan ON(TMP) Date: April17,2014at12:08PM |
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Fan turning ON: State: ot:36.50 it:38.10 oh:34.50 ih:49.40 sv:4.77 |
We lost the $80 wind turbine during the first week of operation to a wind storm, but the turbine was a last minute addition and so not very important to the overall success of the project. You can buy this wind turbine on Amazon here. It would only contribute a trickle charge during the night to the project. Based on the limited data we received from the box, it would only add an hour of runtime every day. Following is an analysis of the wind data:
Total Number of Data Points: 49
Number of Unloaded 50W Wind Turbine Data Points: 37
Average Windspeed: 7.1 MPH
Low: 0.0 MPH
High: 16 MPH
Number of Current Samples (Loaded 50W Wind Turbine): 12
Average Current Delivered to Battery: 22ma
Low Current Delivered to Battery: 0ma
High Current Delivered to Battery: 138.6ma
Max Power from Turbine to Battery: 0.5W
Here’s the latest picture and power system status from the RasPiConnect (www.milocreek.com) screens.
