Restarted because insufficient battery current available for power-on (360 min safety delay completed

Troubleshooting
1

I have a Notecarrier A with a NOTE-WBNA-500 in a Voltaicsystems 0.3 Watt 3.3 Volt Solar Power System

Everything was working great until we had a few days of rain with no sun.

After the power drain, the device did not start up after the Li-Ion-Capacitor became fully charged from the Solar Panel.

This is unexpected behavior. That is, I would expect the device to begin syncing with Notehub once the Li-Ion-Capacitor became charged.

What do you think is going on here?

Details

Look at the data from
“created_at”: “2024-09-23T10:58:33.227206Z”, to “created_at”: “2024-09-30T18:36:49.395023Z” at this link where I’m capturing data at my REST API

The summary is this:

  • the device reported as expected until the voltage dropped to 2.953125 on 23-Sept
body: {'humidity':71.625,'pressure':98716.96,'status':'heartbeat','temperature':18.65625,'time':1727070826,'voltage':2.953125}

*After waiting to see if it would sync after being charged by the solar (which didn’t happen) I next brought it in the house, today 30-Sept. I first measured the voltage of the Lithium Ion Capacitor to be 3.7. Then I plugged it into my PC, and it then began to sync with Notehub.

Here were the first messages, in order as it began to sync today, 30-Sept

{
    "text": "restarted because insufficient battery current available for power-on (360 min safety delay completed)",
    "voltage": 2.9277344
}

{
    "text": "USB power ON {usb-enabled}",
    "voltage": 4.8046875
}

{
    "text": "boot (brown-out & hard reset [16868] [2.0] [M:POWER] G:Gp M:Mps U:W0 R:Rp:W~ S:Sp:ISD T:W~ I:W~)",
    "voltage": 4.7148438
}

What is the solution here, so that I can deploy this to the field and expect it to start syncing after a power drain?

2

Hi @johnedstone,

Even though the LIC was fully charged when you pulled it out of the enclosure, the Notecard may have still been in an insufficient power supply penalty box. We are very conservative when it comes to avoiding unnecessary attempts at syncing data, as that can have an adverse effect on battery and network registrations.

If this happens again, I would recommend debugging the Notecard with a cable like the TTL-232R-RPI debug cable from FTDI (we have a guide here). This will let you debug the Notecard over USB without providing power.

Rob

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3

What is the solution then, when a device is deployed in the field, to avoid insufficient power supply penalty box? This assumes that once it is in the penalty box, it has to be retrieved and powered by USB.

4

Sorry, I wasn’t clear - if you look at the penalty box docs, you can see that the length of the penalty box can be quite long (especially if the Notecard has tried to connect for multiple days without having sufficient voltage). So, it may be the case that you just needed to give it more time and it would’ve connected. That’s why I said next time to use a debugger that won’t power the Notecard, that way you can check to see if it’s in a penalty box or not without disrupting the current state.

Separately, you could alternatively swap in a small LiPo in place of the LIC (i.e. connect solar JST to SOLAR on Notecarrier and LiPo JST to LIPO on Notecarrier).

1 Like
5

Okay, thank you.
I will check out the penalty box documentation?

And, I’ll get the TTL-232R-RPI debug cable from FTDI, for next time.

Also, I thought, perhaps I would implement some of the ideas in the low power design, to shut it off sooner. Assuming that it was in a low power penalty box, would this be an approach to solve this problem?

1 Like
6

That’s a great idea actually. Using the voltage variable behaviors with the hub.set API would allow you to effectively stop trying to sync once you reach a specified voltage threshold from your power source.

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