Sensecap Device tested

i received my

yesterday, and i tested it for a day, and i can say its working fine, i expect some days of runtime, maybe some weeks in tracker mode. it has good gps reception!
the internal antenna for 868lora seems to be very good, i expereinced the same range as some of my other devices with normal, external antennas…

overall a good device, not expensive for a waterproof all included nrf52 !

3 Likes

Got mine as well!
Impressed with the battery life and GPS. It feels heavy but it’s just 37 grams, so I hope I can lift it with my C0 drone.
Unfortunately it seems the sensors are not yet operational in Meshtastic.

USB power gets detected nicely, something I’ve struggled with on my Heltec ESP32 devices.

I’ve only seen the light flashing green or when connected to a PC, being sollid green. No legend/documentation on what the light can do so far.
The buzzer hasn’t given me a melody yet, but I haven’t looked into that yet.

yeez it definitely droneable :slight_smile: also waterproof !
maybe kite-able :slight_smile:
i am not impressed with battery life, i expected that, because its nrf52,
i still have to test it in tracker mode with power saving…

but i am very impresssed with the internal antenna ! in my test-drives it showed same ranges( sending and receiving) as other devices with external antennas, like t echo or t beam or my rak devices. the antenna must be very well tuned to meshtastic frequency !
also gps reception is very good, it shows up to 26 sats indoors , whereas at the same place other devices just catch 5-6… after some time…

i dont even know about the sensors, i am not sure if the sensecap meshtastic device has all of the sensors…
the buzzer is working, but it is not enabled in software yet ! so i think it is hard coded :slight_smile: and the delivery-firmware is some special firmware like it was for the heltec capsule…

we have to wait for meshtastic firmware support for sensecap, i know someone is working on it :slight_smile:
then the sensors and buzzer might be controllable :slight_smile:

it appears the light and temperature sensors are working after all!
I see the temperature in my Android client using the latest alpha firmware (2.4.3.9 ).
With latest stable (2.4.2 ) I only saw temperature (and lux!) in debug for some reason.
The product description warns that the accelerometer is not yet working in Meshtastic. It would be awesome if the GPS (and Detection Sensor) would be triggered by motion.

Update:

also tested tracker functionality:
Sleep, get gps position, send position, sleep

that working fine, intervall as set in menu.
probably battery runtime about 2-3 weeks.
small problem: everytime it wakes up, it plays the reboot beep, from the speaker, helpfull on the bench to know when its waking up. not helpfull when used as a tracker… probably needs a firmware update to enable buzzer controls and sensors…

update: successfully had it running in tracker mode (power saving) for 6 days, reporting position every 10 minutes (!) .
after 6 days battery level was still somtehing above 50% , so i stopped the test…
runtime as tracker ( with 10 minutes reporting ) is at least 6 days, probably 2 weeks…
i bet 4 weeks are possible if reporting every 2h or so…

now i take it for some range-testing

3 Likes