Has anyone used sealed lead acid (SLA) batteries to power their AudioMoths in the field? I connected the AudioMoths to 12V 5Ah SLA batteries for my field study but some lose power and therefore the clock stops tracking time, which means no scheduled recordings.
I ordered the 1.0 version of the board from PCBGoGo and did not have the battery case installed. I connected the AudioMoth to the battery using some custom wires and soldered the wires to the battery case pins.
We are thinking about adding a buck converter to our existing setup or using the double AA batteries. I do have at least one AM that recorded when the board was 56C, but the voltage was below 12V.
12V is pushing the AudioMoth power regulator quite hard and for longer recordings a 12V supply will cause high temperatures of >54 degrees C above ambient at the regulator, possibly causing it to stop working at high ambient temperatures. Have you considered using a lower voltage battery? 6V lantern batteries would work well.
It is random; some lose power after a day or two, some after 10 days. I check the voltages on the SLA batteries, and they are still around 11-12V (many of the AMs that lose power are on batteries that read at 12V).
Here is my CONFIG file:
Device ID : 2453AC075D3211C4
Firmware : AudioMoth-Firmware-Basic (1.5.0)
Time zone : UTC-5
Sample rate (Hz) : 48000
Gain : Medium
Sleep duration (s) : 480
Recording duration (s) : 120
Active recording periods : 1
Recording period 1 : 10:00 - 18:00 (UTC)
Earliest recording time : ---------- --:--:--
Latest recording time : ---------- --:--:--
Filter : -
Amplitude threshold : -
Minimum threshold duration (s) : -
Enable LED : Yes
Enable low-voltage cutoff : No
Enable battery level indication : Yes
Always require acoustic chime : No
How often do they loose power? What recording schedule and configurations are you using? Could you post the CONFIG.TXT file.