Hi all,
I am looking for an optimized power supply set up with solar panel and battery for field measurement with the Rasberry Shake Boom model.
If I consider that the set up require a 5V DC 2.5 Amp power supply, than I need a daily supply of 306 watt-hour. Consequently, I need a 85 amps-hours at 12 volts battery and a 101 watts solar panel.
This agrees with the set up presented in this link: Solar Power Recommendations — Instructions on Setting Up Your Raspberry Shake
But I want to optimize the set-up with smaller battery and solar panel.
In the manual, it is mentioned the following power supply characteristics:
Startup: 5 Volts x 0.550 A = 3.1 Watts
Run-time: 5 Volts x 0.290 A = 1.9 Watts
In this case, I would need 74.40 watt-hours/days corresponding to a battery of 21 amph at 12 volts and a solar panel of 25 watts.
Anyone has feedbacks on solar panel/battery set up?
This is a very interesting topic, and resource/system optimization is always something essential if we want to reduce some equipment sizes. While waiting for others in the community, to hear if they have any suggestions, have you already tried the solar calculators in the same page on our manual to crosscheck your results and maybe get more data for your planned system?
FYI I designed a custom Pi HAT that monitors the (solar-source) battery supply and gracefully shuts down and restarts the Shake’s Raspberry Pi in the event that the batteries get too depleted. This prevents data corruption when the Pi is otherwise running under voltage. This was created to solve this very problem that was occurring on the Shake I was using which is solar powered. You can message me if you would like to purchase one.