I was testing my Spottor, Dev Kit, and Arduino running for days to see how the battery drains.
After the battery was low and not sending data, I turned the Spotter off, charged it for a few minutes, and turned it on again.
The spotter reran a few minutes later and was low power again.
After this, I fully changed the Spotter. Spotter is running well, but the Mote is not.
Vbus and ground are 4V when I read from the dev kit board.
If I use the wall power connected to Mote, everything runs well.
I think the Spotter is not giving power to the Mote.
I was also enabling and disabling various power-saving configurations.
I wonder if that can cause an issue.
(bridge cfg set 0 s u bridgePowerControllerEnabled 0
cfg glpmen 1
cfg dwl 1380
cfg save)
Could I ask for any help on this? Is there any factory reset that I can do?
Possibility #1 – too much peak power draw…if you have too much peak power draw you’ll see a red LED on the system. This happens over 3500mA (~10W). The best thing to do is bench testing on your payload when attached to the system to estimate peak and normal power use.
Possibility #2 – too low battery level…if the battery voltage drops below about 3.1V, the bridge will turn off to maintain Spotter’s power until it gets back up to 3.5V. You can check the battery level from downloading the CSV in the Spotter dashboard or typing sensors into the USB console on Spotter. EDIT: I think you said you measured 4V here so it’s unlikely but nice to check for someone reading this later.
Possibility #3 – power controller is enabled and the timing is just unfortunate…if you’re doing testing it is really best to disable the bridge power controller. This is covered in the dev kit guides but the setting is bridgePowerControllerEnabled let us know if you can’t find these settings. Once you have done the testing you can re-enable it with the necessary duty cycle, sampling cycle you need. If you’re getting power to the dev kit then this is not the issue as the whole SM bus would be off. You can check this from the serial terminal with bridge cfg status 0 s to review the settings.
Possibility #4 – not the right charger…make sure you have the provided 2A charger and that you are charging Spotter while “off” for now. EDIT: Again, likely not your issue since you’re back up at 4V but good to add to the diagnostics for this issue.
Can you check again and confirm that your peak power is okay, that your battery voltage is still high enough, and that your power controller is disabled? I can recommend next steps shortly.
Thanks for your response. I am working this issue with @cwl20.
#1 - The payload was working fine last week. It was drawing less than 3 watts. #2 - The battery status was reporting mostly charged this morning through the dashboard. It was charging with the provided charger overnight and showed 2 solid green lights this morning. #3 - Power controller was disabled. - we both read through the other threads and confirmed it was off #4 - See #1 - battery was charged, (we are also using the provided charger)
Unfortunately, while debugging this I managed to cause another problem. I plugged in the wall charger to the second set of ports on the dev kit. I double checked polarity, then plugged in the wall wart and turned on the Spotter. The dev kit powered up, but now we are getting no lights or serial communication on the Spotter whatsoever. Whether plugged into the USB charger or not. Nothing. So that is probably a bigger problem…
Let us know if you have any ideas or availability for a call.
@zack_j Currently we are getting no power, no system, go, or signal lights, and no serial port. Can we set up a call? We are trying to deploy this week.
Rowan