Battery timer?

[Michael-AUG]

Hi there Ricardo

I use your firmware on a tracker in the back of my car, powered from the 12v. The tracker also has an 18650 battery in it.

May I suggest that you add the option for a countdown timer for battery power? What happens at the moment is that the 18650 dies every night as the tracker keeps operating. What would be great would be if the tracker would
Keep running for 30 mins after the car turns off?

Is this something you could consider adding?

Many thanks for great software.

Michael GM5AUG

[richonguzman]

Hi Michael,

why not power it fully from the car, so that the car (when powering off) turns also off the tracker?

PS: right now there is no hardware on the tracker to read this and acknowledge it, unless you add some voltage divider and we define a pin for reading the voltage and know when the car turns off

[crowdsalad]

why not power it fully from the car, so that the car (when powering off) turns also off the tracker?

I have my tracker in the back of the car also and that's exactly what I did. I took the 12V from the fuse box below the steering wheel (ignition plus) and inserted a 12V -> 5V regulator into the cable.

I even added a small ON/OFF switch that is within reach while driving. So I can easily switch the tracker off when I don't want to be visible on APRS.

The 5V DC cable runs through the car to the back, there I soldered an USB-C plug for the Heltec Tracker. It works great ...

73 Martin
OE5REO

[arizonajon1]

Hi there Ricardo

I use your firmware on a tracker in the back of my car, powered from the 12v. The tracker also has an 18650 battery in it.

May I suggest that you add the option for a countdown timer for battery power? What happens at the moment is that the 18650 dies every night as the tracker keeps operating. What would be great would be if the tracker would Keep running for 30 mins after the car turns off?

Is this something you could consider adding?

Many thanks for great software.

Michael GM5AUG

Hello Michael -

While it's a bit of a hack, an alternative could be to program the "monitor battery voltage and power-off/sleep if low" feature to be 4.00 or 3.95 Vdc or something like that. Then, once the car is off, the tracker will continue for a while until the set-point voltage is reached, and will shut down gracefully. When the car is started and power re-applied to the tracker, the voltage will nearly immediately rise above the set-point and the tracker will restart.

Just an idea.

Cheers and 73 - Jon N7UV