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Battery Life
It is now almost exactly 7 days since I received the "low battery" warning for my Twine, and it is still happily chugging along, showing 2.62 V. I believe in caution, especially in mission-critical situations, but I do think that for routine use the low voltage trigger level is set too high (it would be nice if users were able to set this level, based on the importance of what they are monitoring).
I will continue to let the Twine run, monitoring it every few hours (but not overnight), and see roughly at which point it shuts down.
Will keep you posted!
I will continue to let the Twine run, monitoring it every few hours (but not overnight), and see roughly at which point it shuts down.
Will keep you posted!
Comments
Granted, my twine has been sitting almost idle since, so YMMV.
For the record, this Twine is running with moisture sensor plugged in, but dry.
i received my email notification today, a week after activation and to be honest this is the 2nd word i got from my twine. i set up a rule for temperature but seems not working (i guess there is a bug between C and F so my twine is lost even after few changes)
anyway, I'm happy to see it is at least working for something : using battery and make me aware of it.
I do not remember such in the specs I bought in a year ago
Still sitting on a shelf.
It is not clear if those of your reporting poor battery life are actually experiencing you Twin dying, of are simply believing the low battery message. If the former, it would be good to know what you were doing, if the latter, you need to know that the low battery message is being triggered at far too high a voltage, and I expect that Supermechanical will get around to addressing that issue in time.
Further low battery messages (after the 1st one) seem to be triggered by the Twine "doing" something, ie. reporting a sensor transition, or by the owner updating rules.
The good news is it came right back up and reported within a few seconds after new batteries were installed.
Also noted, with the new batteries, plugging in the moisture sensor causes a 0.02 V battery voltage drop, indicating that there is some current draw by the sensor. This remains constant, whether the sensor is "dry" or "wet". So, attaching a sensor does have a very small effect on battery life, but it does not seem to matter whether the sensor is "on" or "off".
I put new Duracell batteries in, and set up a vibration rule, to log triggers to a database. I left the Twine in "slow" update mode.
AT MOST 72 hours after putting in fresh batteries, I got the "low batteries" alert email. During that time, Twine had logged maybe 20 hits to its vibration trigger.
3 days of battery life equals an unusable Twine. As others have mentioned, part of the issue is having the low battery threshold set so high (2.8 V, I believe) - so I get the warning way too early, and don't change the batteries when they really need to be changed. But dropping 1/10 volt per day (if that progression remains linear) doesn't bode well for battery longevity.