Hypnos Board: A Low-Cost All-In-One Solution for Environment Sensor
Power Management, Data Storage, and Task Scheduling
Abstract
Open source in-situ environmental sensor hardware continues to expand
across the geosphere to a variety of applications. These systems
typically perform three fundamental tasks: sample sensors at a specified
time or period, save data onto retrievable media, switch power to
components on and off in between sample cycles to conserve battery
energy and increase field operation time. This is commonly accomplished
through integrating separate off-the-shelf components into the desired
system such as: power relays, SD card hardware, Real-Time Clocks (RTCs),
and coin cell batteries. To enable faster prototyping, the Openly
Published Environmental Sensing Lab abstracted all of these requirements
into a single PCB that can be dropped into any project to achieve these
commonly-required capabilities. The hardware is laid out in a
“Feather” form factor, a popular configuration in the open-source
hardware community, to easily mate with other industry standard
products. The onboard RTC acts as an alarm clock that wakes a
user-attached micro controller from low-power sleep modes in between
sample cycles. By integrating all these components into a single PCB, we
save cost while significantly reducing physical system size. The design
as well as a suite of code functions that enable the user to configure
all the Hypnos board features are detailed. For more information, please
visit open-sensing.org/projects.