Been a while since I’ve been on here and finally going to tinker with this. I ordered a
8 Channel LoRa Gateway HAT from adafruit and also a meshtastic T-Beam.
How hard would it be to make a sensor to notify me when I lose power at a specific location? As in a building or facility, we have random power outages where I work and this would help a lot.
Thanks
Very easy, as easy as reading the voltage before the voltage regulator / charger circuitry. You will need a voltage divider made of two resistors. You can take the reading on the usb socket. When you read 5V, there is power. When you read zero or so, there is no more power, and it is time to send a message.
You will need a battery for that of course.
Ok, great. I think I got the gist of that. Thanks @Eagle
Just a thought, for those of us with T-Beams sat plugged in with battery, can we have the node send a message when it notices its not being powered/charged?
EDIT: Just seen one of my nodes doesnt recognise being powered, but sits at 100% all the time. Perhaps better for 95% to be the trigger for a power out?
Small flag in the config to turn on this feature?
I wonder if we could use the idle-high state of the USB to Serial chip to detect power status more reliably without adding HW?
Hey, have you ever implemented a solution for this? Looking to add this to my restaurant.
Maybe the a nice robust solution, would to have a relay connected to mains power (though a power adaptor) that actually keeps the lora device powered off.
If the power goes out, the device is powered up (obviously off a battery) and it can then just keep sending a message on a loop.
Use the NC - normally closed - contact on the relay. This keeps sensing simple, and could use just about any Lora Device as the transmitter. As the device is completely disconnected from battery will last a really long time between power outages.
More advanced setups with the Detection Sensor module are almost certainly possible