I have a three Xbee series 2 communicating with an Arduino, with one outside using a SunnyBuddy for power. All working well until a few weeks ago when the outside sensor would just stop communicating. Disconnecting the battery/and or powering down everything would fix it, other times not. The power light comes on, but the green one does not always light up. Trying to see if this board can fail? Or is it the SunnyBuddy?
The other two Xbees are doing fine (but inside the house with wall power).
You can use a multimeter to test the output of the sunnybuddy to determine if it is the culprit
Does swapping modules change anything? (put the inside one outside and vice-versa)
In general, yes, electronics will all eventually fail…was it exposed to the elements outdoors? That vastly accelerates their degradation (use an enclosure and/or coatings to combat this)
Russell,
Thanks so much for your prompt reply. Yes, swapping out modules was the next controlled experiment to try. I have swapped one Sunny Buddy out once (this system has been operating for ~9 years!), but that was about 2 years ago, so I thought it might be okay still. It’s all enclosed; however, the old enclosure did leak and it was damp inside, so now everything is in a new, nicer box. One other variable is that I moved the unit (temperature sensor by the way) to the back of the yard, maybe ~150-175 ft away. The other thing I was going to try was moving it back closer. Waiting for weekend free time to try all this out!
Thanks again.
I support a bunch of XBee equipped devices in my professional capacity and I’d guess I’ve personally programmed close to 200 with Sparkfun Explorers (USB & Serial) with perhaps 10x more passing through to our customers. The only XBees I’ve had to toss were killed by exceptional circumstances. The Explorers live comfortable lives but they’ve been perfectly reliable.
Two instances come to mind: the well-meaning but improper power washing of a batch of instruments and another that got too^2 hot in a foundry setting.