BeeAInspector Blog #3 - News on a tiny participant and unpacking the hardware

Hi all,

welcome to our third blog entry for the Save the Bees Challenge.
Delayed third blog entry, due to our trip and a third tiny participant taking part in this project. 
Unfortunately, we cannot expect her help yet. She will step foot on this planted once the due date of this project if over.
We still hope that we can find a few spare minutes to come closer to the targeted goals of our project.
Because there is a lot of new topics to be discovered. Back to the project.

We finally received our boards to get started.
What did we receive and how to continue from here?
I somehow did not find this information dummy-proof on the Arduino website. So here we go:

Picture time :

Arduino MKR WAN 1310 Board:

Tiny box which shows the micro controller	Main basic specs are listed on the back,

All items that have been in the box (Am I missing the antenna?!). We planned to hook up this board to the LoRa network to send evaluated data from the vision board.	Backside is flat and could be nicely mounted against another PCB, header is already preinstalled. Plastic housing also shows the names of the expected signals/ports.

I am a tiny bit surprised that there is no antenna for the LoRa functionality.
At least I thought I saw a tiny RF Port like an U.FL (micro UFL ) or i-pex.
This seems like a ReadTheFriendlyManual situation. 

And I definitely have to read it before powering the board on. At least from FPV drones I know that it is not a good idea to run a radio without antenna. But if this would be the case I would expect a warning label to RTFM. 

Also, there is no micro USB cable to Type A or Type C in the package.  
Good think that I have a bunch of them lying around at home.
At least from the Type A.

In order to get an estimate how long we could run of an 18650 cell, we are interested in the the power consumption of the board.

With the stock firmware comes out at around:  24mA @5V (over ~5min we had roughly 10mWh)

Measured with an USB Meter: RUIDENG UM34

It is not the most accurate measurement tool but it gives us at least a neighborhood where we are.

And we can compare the stock firmware to our implementation.

Spec of the measurement tool so you do not have to look it up:

Product model: UM34 (Type A) / UM34C (Type B) Display: 1.44 inch (3.44 cm) color LCD display
Voltage measurement range: 4-24,000V Voltage measurement resolution: 0.01V
Current measurement range: 0 - 5,000 A, resolution of the current measurement: 0.001 A.
Storage Capacity: 0-99999mAh Voltage Measurement Accuracy: ± (0.2% + 1 digit)
Energy Scale Range: 0-999.99Wh Current Measurement Accuracy: ± (0.8% + 3 displays)
Load impedance range: 0.8 ÷ 9999.9 Ω Time measurement range: 0-99h59min59s
Temperature range: -10℃ -100℃ / 0℉ -200℉ Temperature measurement error: ±3℃ / ±6℉

Nicla Vision Arduino Pro

Front site of the box is nicely done with a matt and shiny finish, did not expect that from a visual dev board	Backside of the Nicla Vision in a nice contrast rich green, sticky tapes on the stick are definitely not temper proof, but why should they be

Complete content which we received. *Me happy* there is an antenna and the tiny label even says what it is for. 2.4GHz -> WiFi so no need to reed the manual?   I do not think so, I should make sure that I do not violate the EU threshold of sending power for radio

Very tiny board from the front? let’s say camera side	And tiny board form the back? Let’s say connector site

Can I solder that tiny board directly to the MKR board? Unfortunately, there are no labels on the board so we have to lookup the pins online to avoid releasing the magic black smoke by blindly plugging them together.

Link to the picture on the left:
https://content.arduino.cc/assets/ABX00051-pinout.png

Link to the picture on the right:
https://content.arduino.cc/assets/Pinout-MKRwan1310_latest.png

It should work!
So we solder headers on the Nicla Vision board and plug it to the MKR on.
The I2C port is aligned, which we plan to use and also UART should be fine and we might even have some ports over for additional sensors, if there is some time left.

The only critical Pin I see so far is Pin 7 which might fight against 3V3 from MKR.
And I would also avoid plugin in both USB cables at the same time when the boards are connected?!

We have also measured the power consumption of this board.

The stock firmware comes out at around:  59mA @5V (over ~5min we had roughly 26mWh) measured with the same USB Meter mentioned above.

So, with an 18650 Cell (3.6V 2500mAh) we expect a runtime with both boards of roughly.

21 hrs. or ~1 day for a remote measuring site is too little, even with 100% efficiency.

We should either think of recharging the battery via solar panel. 

Or highly improve the computation duty cycle of the boards and send it to sleep as soon as possible.

In the next blog we will show the pictures of the actual nest we are interested in.
And will come up with a  first pseudo code how to write the progam.