[Shannon Hicks]

The very bottom-left corner of the schematic for board v1.1 mentions the two charge rates, which you can control using solder jumper SJ15.  Here’s the description of that jumper from the Jumper Settings page:

SJ15:  Lipo battery charge rate:  500mA (default) or 1A.  This jumper allows you to select the maximum charger output current of the onboard Lipo charger.  Default setting is 500mA (solder jumper open).  Add a solder bridge to increase the rate to 1A.  Note that you’ll also need to close jumper SJ14 (set input limit to 1A) in order to get 1A charger output.  This setting should only be changed if your input power source can supply more than 500mA.  Setting the rate to 1A also causes the bq24074 charger chip to get extremely hot during charging, so use caution.

There are 2 solar panel jacks on the Mayfly v1.0 and v1.1. This was done to provide backwards-compatibility for older existing stations that still have the white JST plug soldered to the end of the solar panel extension cable.  Since most people don’t want to have to solder things when assembling their kits, we switched to using the black quick-connect jack in 2021 so that people could simply insert the bare leads of the solar panel extension cable into the plug without having to solder anything.  Only one solar panel jack should be used on a deployed station though.  The 2 options are there just for convenience.  Likewise, there are still 2 JST jacks labeled LIPO BATT, but users should only connect one battery at a time.  The second jack is a legacy feature from many years ago when we used cellular boards that required a direct connection to the battery using a little double-ended JST cable.  It will likely be removed from future Mayfly versions to eliminate confusion.

[Shannon Hicks]

If your sample/transmission rate is set to 15 minutes and you were getting that poor of a battery life out of your stations, then they definitely aren’t going into sleep mode, so I’d suggest investigating the code that’s running on the Mayfly to learn more about its behavior.

[Shannon Hicks]

James, your station seems to be using power at a rate much higher than a usual CTD station.  Our Mayfly v1.1 boards with EnviroDIY sim7080 LTE board and a CTD sensor will see a decrease in the battery voltage overnight of 0.045v during a 12 hour period with absolutely no sunlight, and transmitting the data to the portal every 5 minutes.  Your station seems to use at least 0.15v overnight, so that’s indicates the board is probably not sleeping or has some other thing that is drawing more power than the solar panel can replace the next day.  And if your Mayfly’s clock is wrong, it sounds like the CR1220 coin cell on the board is dead or installed incorrectly.  It should retain the proper time for multiple years, even if the main external lipo drops out due to bad charging.  When a new, charged battery is connected to your Mayfly, is the green LED next to the power switch turned on constantly?  For logger deployments, it should be deactivated by turning off the small DIP switch next to the LED as described in the EnviroDIY monitoring station manual.  And if there’s something incorrect with the Arduino code of the logger, it can prevent the board from going into sleep mode between readings, at that could be the reason for your excessive power usage.  It looks like all of the stations in Spokane are behaving the same way and using more power than normal.

[Shannon Hicks]

What version of Mayfly board do you have?  And what brand of cellular board?  There are a lot of combinations of hardware on EnviroDIY stations, and some are much more efficient than others.  Also, do you have a spare Lipo battery that you can fully charge separately in your office and then put it into the station?  If your logger is only working when there’s sunlight, then it’s pretty likely that your battery is faulty and won’t charge, that’s why it’s not providing power overnight.

[Shannon Hicks]

Have you had any luck getting it to work?  If not, have you tried opening the Arduino Serial Monitor to see what the Mayfly prints to your computer when the Mayfly starts up and after each attempted sensor reading?  You can also email your sketch to me at mayfly@envirodiy.edu if you’d like me to take a look at it to see if it’s possibly a code issue.

[Shannon Hicks]

It’s been a while since we’ve used Xbee modules with our Mayfly boards, so I don’t remember all the tricks to configuring the routers and coordinators, but your Mayfly code looks correct to me.  Have you tried removing the wake and sleep commands and just leave the Xbee module constantly powered to see if that helps?  Are you using the Mayfly v.05b board for all your tests?  There were some significant design changes when we migrated to the v1.0 board, some of which affect how the Mayfly’s Xbee socket behaves.

[Shannon Hicks]

If you’re talking about the external solar panels that we ship with the EnviroDIY Monitoring Station Kit, they are made by Voltaic Systems, and they offer a variety of extension cables for placing the panel further from the logger.  The connector is a basic 3.5×1.1 mm barrel jack, but it has a unique waterproof design that is better for outdoor use than standard barrel jack/plug combos.  We’ve used the 4-foot and 10-foot extensions before with good results.  You can find their extension cables here:  https://voltaicsystems.com/connectors-extensions/

[Shannon Hicks]

Sensor readings of -9999 mean the Mayfly logger isn’t receiving valid data from the CTD sensor.  If this is a brand new sensor, then it’s probably because the sensor SDI-12 channel number is set to the default channel of 0 (zero) and the Mayfly needs the sensor to be something other than that (because for Meter Group sensors, channel 0 means the sensor is in serial-TTL data output mode and isn’t prepared to communicate with SDI-12 protocol loggers, like what the Mayfly does in our example code).   So you’ll need to change the sensor channel number, and if you’re using one of our sample sketches, we usually use channel 1 for the CTD sensor.  In the EnviroDIY Monitoring Station Manual in section 6.3 there’s a description of the steps needed for connecting a CTD sensor to the Mayfly logger, including a link to the Github page where there are instructions for how to use the SDI-12 address change example sketch to change the sensor address.

If you’ve already changed the sensor channel, then other reasons for the -9999 signal are usually because the sensor isn’t connected securely into the Grove headphone jack board (if you bought a sensor with a 3.5mm stereo plug on it), or if you’re using a bare-wire sensor, then the wires are in the wrong terminals.  Or the Grove cable connecting your sensors adapter board to the Mayfly is plugged into a Grove port other than one of the two jacks labeled SDI-12.

[Shannon Hicks]

It depends on what you mean by communicate.  Are you wanting to transmit data wirelessly between a Mayfly and another Arduino-compatible device?  Or are you meaning a direct cable connection between the two devices?  Either way is possible, but it really depends on a lot of factors, like what sort of data are you transferring, how often, and why.

As stated in the first post on this thread:  This is the forum thread to ask general technical question about the Mayfly v1.1 board.  If you’ve got a basic question such as what are the board’s features or how it differs from previous versions, this is the place to ask.  If you’ve got a more complicated question or issue, then it is probably best to start your own thread.  The goal of this thread is to be a great information resource for basic questions about the new v1.1 board that are common to all users.

So I’d suggest creating a new topic in the Mayfly forum for your question.

[Shannon Hicks]

If you’re using an external FTDI or CP2102 interface board to program your Mayfly via the Mayfly’s FTDI socket, then the Mayfly dipswitch labeled USB should be turned off before connecting the external interface to the Mayfly, and it should stay off the entire time.

What version of the Arduino IDE are you using?  From your screenshot, it looks like you might be using one of the newer versions.  On our software instructions page here:  https://www.envirodiy.org/mayfly/software/    we recommend that you use the Legacy v1.8.x version since there are some quirks about the newer v2.0 and web-based Arduino IDE’s that can cause issues with the Mayfly.

When you plug your CP2102 Friend into your computer’s USB port, what does Windows Device Manager say?  Does a “Silicon Labs CP210x USB to UART Bridge (COMx)” show up under the “Ports (COM & LPT)” list, or is it shown under an Unknown Device tab with a yellow triangle?

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