Jamiestyles
New Member
Hi,
So I have built a weather station that monitors the wind speed, gusts, wind range, temperature, rainfall and cloudbase. You call it up via telephone, it answers the call, tells you the information by putting together sound clips stored on the VMUSIC3 and then hangs up on you. It is solar powered and so power consumption is really important.
It all works hapily for days but eventually the lead acid battery dies once we get a run of bad weather. I placed a multimeter across it and the big current drain is the VMUSIC3 and so I want it to only turn on when a phone call comes in. Easy... I thought... placing a transistor across the negative power supply.
When doing this it powers up fine, waits a few seconds to initialise (green status light goes solid) and then the serial output from picaxe plays
the appropriate sound bites. The first time it runs it is fine, but whenever I use a transitor to turn it on the second time, it plays the first two clips fine, skips out some sound clips, then freezes. Take the transistor out and it works fine. It's not a voltage issue as the VMUSIC3 works fine if you leave it for about 10 seconds before sending the serial commands, but I can't work out if it's the picaxe sending corrupted serial or the VMUSIC3 just needs longer than it indicates to settle.
I have tried:
Lots of capacitors in different places
Using a relay instead (same problem) on both the positive and negative side of the VMUSIC3
At a loss! Any ideas of what to try?
Many thanks
Jamie
So I have built a weather station that monitors the wind speed, gusts, wind range, temperature, rainfall and cloudbase. You call it up via telephone, it answers the call, tells you the information by putting together sound clips stored on the VMUSIC3 and then hangs up on you. It is solar powered and so power consumption is really important.
It all works hapily for days but eventually the lead acid battery dies once we get a run of bad weather. I placed a multimeter across it and the big current drain is the VMUSIC3 and so I want it to only turn on when a phone call comes in. Easy... I thought... placing a transistor across the negative power supply.
When doing this it powers up fine, waits a few seconds to initialise (green status light goes solid) and then the serial output from picaxe plays
the appropriate sound bites. The first time it runs it is fine, but whenever I use a transitor to turn it on the second time, it plays the first two clips fine, skips out some sound clips, then freezes. Take the transistor out and it works fine. It's not a voltage issue as the VMUSIC3 works fine if you leave it for about 10 seconds before sending the serial commands, but I can't work out if it's the picaxe sending corrupted serial or the VMUSIC3 just needs longer than it indicates to settle.
I have tried:
Lots of capacitors in different places
Using a relay instead (same problem) on both the positive and negative side of the VMUSIC3
At a loss! Any ideas of what to try?
Many thanks
Jamie
