Same config, same batteries, same SD, vastly different recording times? Audiomoth stopping recording after approx. 60 hours regular issue

I am having a recurring issue where my Audiomoths are stopping recording after only 60 hours at 48kHz. I believe it may be associated with the Enable low-voltage cut-off : Yes setting. Previously you could turn this off in the config, but now it is no longer an option? Below are two deployments with identical batteries, SD cards and configurations. Energiser Pro Max Plus Batteries, Sandisk Extreme 64GB cards. One records for only 58 hours, the other for 166 hours (the amount of time I would expect). This issue happened to me on almost 30 recorders in my last deployment, and I decided it must have been a bad batch of batteries (was using Varta) so I swapped to Energiser Pro Max Plus and the issue still persists. Any ideas why? Summary files and config attached. The early stoppage seems to occur when the battery drops to 3.5v, but this is happening far earlier than it should right? v1.2 Audiomoths. Previously have had no issues getting 160-180 hours out of normal alkaline batteries. Any advice appreciated, thank you!

14 comments

14 Comments

Noëlle Tschirren

Sep 25

Hey Alex and Callan, I currently have 50 audiomoth deviced deployed and just took in the 3 first ones to check. They all have the same settings, 2 of them worked fine, one of them stopped writing files after 60h of good recordings. It still wrote 5 files after, but they are empty. The one with the problem has a SanDisk Extreme 64Gb from Taiwan, the other two are a SanDisk Extreme 64Gb and a SanDisk Pro 64Gb both from China. I will go to the fieldsite tomorrow and check all of them for errors. Also I set them without any sleep duration, so the writing error might also due to that and the card is just a coincidence. Please let me know if you have any updates!

Alex Rogers

Oct 05

Replying to

Thanks for tracking this down. It's very fustrating as SanDisk Extreme cards have always been very reliable and low-energ in the past. GroupGets are checking their stock. The ones that they've looked at so far seem to be made in Malaysia. We'll try to get examples of all of them so we can measure their energy consumption.