I wanted a simple way to log the voltage of the LEAP#439 QX5252 Solar Night Light, rechargeable battery to get a sense of the overnight discharge and daily recharge pattern.
It didn’t need to be particularly accurate, but I did want to get a fairly continuous log at least every 5 minutes or so. Sounds like a perfect case for some Arduino-powered data logging!
I could just capture some data locally to an SD card, but sending the data to the cloud is much more appealing, as it means I can access and do some analysis at any time without needing to be local to the device.
There are many established and roll-your-own solutions for this problem, but I’ve taken this as an opportunity to experiment in particular with Adafruit IO:
- collect measurements to a feed
- create a simple dashboard
- setup triggers to notify on low/high voltage
I was quickly impressed by Adafruit IO! It is extremely easy to get something simple up and running. It doesn’t over-reach in terms of features (or price), so I can see this being a great prototyping platform for relatively straight-forward control and data collection. But this also means you can probably imagine much more ambitious projects that require more than Adafruit IO has to offer.
For my initial problem - log some data about the state of a rechargeable battery over a couple of days - it was perfect. Literally took me 10 minutes from signing up at Adafruit to when I had data streaming into a feed. Doing more research on how it worked and writing my notes took far longer;-)
As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Electronics & Arduino Projects repo on GitHub
Here’s a sample of the voltage measurements I’m seeing on the dashboard:
