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    ESP 8266 sleep mode and Arduino plug-in

    Hi,

    I have made water leak detection sensors by using the Adafruit ESP8266 Huzzah Feather board. I can wire up to 7 sensors into the ESP 8266 and monitor using the Arduino plugin in HS3. This if fine for the basement because I can put a unit near the washing machine, laundry sink, hot water heater and steam humidifier. I can easily run power to the ESP8266 and use 4 conductor wire to all of the sensors because I have an unfinished basement. I would like to use these sensors in the main level and upstairs but running the power is a problem. Has anyone powered the ESP8266 with battery? I read that the unit can go into several sleep modes but I am concerned about wifi connections. It would be great to the current consumption in the uA range.

    Thank You in advance,

    Ronnie

    #2
    Seems like alot of work for water sensors. I've got 7 xiaomi zigbee aqua sensors around my house, bathrooms,washer, water heater etc using a conbee along with jowiehue plugin. These are fantastic and small and look good too. Even on the second floor, I have no communication with the conbee stick attached to my hs server in the basement. Btw, battery lasts forever. Their response is fast as well. I do test them now and then. Oh, they also report battery back to the plugin.
    I would highly recommend them... high WAF.
    HS3PRO 3.0.0.500 as a Fire Daemon service, Windows 2016 Server Std Intel Core i5 PC HTPC Slim SFF 4GB, 120GB SSD drive, WLG800, RFXCom, TI103,NetCam, UltraNetcam3, BLBackup, CurrentCost 3P Rain8Net, MCsSprinker, HSTouch, Ademco Security plugin/AD2USB, JowiHue, various Oregon Scientific temp/humidity sensors, Z-Net, Zsmoke, Aeron Labs micro switches, Amazon Echo Dots, WS+, WD+ ... on and on.

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      #3
      WiFi is a battery hog. Even using sleep mode you need to be very careful on the board design so that things like status LED and other ancillary circuity is not draining the battery. If you want to look at a ultra low power design that employs WiFi then take a look at TrigBoard. External circuitry is used to know when to apply power to the ESP8266 so the ESP8266 is not using any power until the trigger condition (e.g. water detected discrete) is activated and then the ESP8266 goes through a normal power-up cycle, connects to WiFi, sends the payload and then shuts down.

      I also have been very happy with the xiaomi water detect sensors that use zigbee. In my case I interface with zigbee2mqtt that I run on RPi. You can also use them as contact sensors for remote places where you have make/break contacts wired to the sensors probes. I initially deployed them in April 2019 at every fixture. Last report in the log shows 91% battery.

      2020-2-13 15:38:23 - info: MQTT publish: topic 'zigbee/0x00158d00026e2bf1', payload '{"battery":91,"voltage":2985,"linkquality":490,"water_leak" :false}'

      YoLink has a nice probe design on their sensor. It is a little larger than the xiaomi one, but has probes on both the bottom and the top of the sensor. The top probes are in a little depression on the top so it something drips the depression will fill and water will be detected. The bottom probes are like the xiaomi on the bottom to detect water on the floor. YoLilnk has an API for their LoRa sensors, but it is an API to the cloud.

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        #4
        Thank You for the feedback, I will look into those sensors.

        Thanks again,

        Ronnie

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by Michael McSharry View Post
          WiFi is a battery hog. Even using sleep mode you need to be very careful on the board design so that things like status LED and other ancillary circuity is not draining the battery. If you want to look at a ultra low power design that employs WiFi then take a look at TrigBoard. External circuitry is used to know when to apply power to the ESP8266 so the ESP8266 is not using any power until the trigger condition (e.g. water detected discrete) is activated and then the ESP8266 goes through a normal power-up cycle, connects to WiFi, sends the payload and then shuts down.

          I also have been very happy with the xiaomi water detect sensors that use zigbee. In my case I interface with zigbee2mqtt that I run on RPi. You can also use them as contact sensors for remote places where you have make/break contacts wired to the sensors probes. I initially deployed them in April 2019 at every fixture. Last report in the log shows 91% battery.

          2020-2-13 15:38:23 - info: MQTT publish: topic 'zigbee/0x00158d00026e2bf1', payload '{"battery":91,"voltage":2985,"linkquality":490,"water_leak" :false}'

          YoLink has a nice probe design on their sensor. It is a little larger than the xiaomi one, but has probes on both the bottom and the top of the sensor. The top probes are in a little depression on the top so it something drips the depression will fill and water will be detected. The bottom probes are like the xiaomi on the bottom to detect water on the floor. YoLilnk has an API for their LoRa sensors, but it is an API to the cloud.
          For a quick and dirty interface between Yolink and Homeseer I just have the Yolink sensor kick off an Alexa routine to turn a Homeseer virtual device on or off. Since Yolink is cloud only anyway there is no major disadvantage to adding Amazon into the mix and so far it has been working well for me.

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