Monitoring battery voltage on Sky

I’m remote IT for a family member 2300 miles away and their ancient Sky is just eating batteries like crazy. I note that the website does report the Air battery (still 3.14V after over a year) but not the Sky battery. Is it possible to have the web gui display both battery levels ?

Bonus points if it’s possible to have an alert via email if their battery level drops. Is that something I can remotely set up via an api key perhaps ? They’re not IT savvy nor interested but I could throw a quickie docker container up and hit an api occasionally to remind them.

Ideas ?

Toggle the battery card off and on again in the station settings. Both Air and Sky should be displaying battery cards.

You can also go into the top-secret station status page. The link is hidden at the bottom of the station’s web page, and you can access it by clicking the green online status light. That page contains all kinds of extra debugging info, such as uptimes and battery voltages for every attached device…

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Hi Vince,
I still love my Air and Skys. I usually run the Skys on the power booster accessory but the rechargeable batteries in my power boosters are beginning to fail so I am in the process of replacing those batteries. In the mean time I am running a Sky on Alkaline batteries. Yesterday I replaced my Air Alkaline cells for I think for just their third set. I attach a couple of voltage graphs and a link to where you can see more voltage history to help your voltage drop and battery life expectations.

cheers Ian :slight_smile:

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Thank you. I am on the other US coast from the station but I think he’s not using the good lithium batteries. He only got 6 weeks or so on the last set for the Sky. The Air is still going strong after 16 months.

I didn’t even try the solar panel add-on for the Sky since I know it didn’t work. None of the four I tried worked for more than a little while. Quality there was very very poor in my experience (I was a field tester for that ages ago).

I’ll probably ask him to let me see his station login+password again so I can set up an API key for his gear and write a little something to monitor the battery levels remotely via cron.

Brief followup - graphs show the Air was 3.42V on 9/22/22 and is down to 3.13V today which is pretty good for 23 months so far…

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Hi Vince,
An issue with the Sky batteries is that there are four pairs of cells in parallel and often the flat cells have some which have not been connected. Because the door flap and spring tension does not ensure all four are connected. And if you looked at my graph you see it was going flat too quickly but then something changed and I guess the movement from the wind caused some cells to make a better connection and the voltage went up. Now I hope all four pairs are supplying power.

cheers Ian

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