Too many comments to read through, so I don't know if anyone else has suggested this. From your battery, you could use a 48V DC converter (12V to 48V) and from there, connect a UniFi US8-60W. From there, connect your Nanostation. That would also give you enough power on your PoE passthrough to power your UVC or other PoE camera. That has been working great for me. I currently use 100 watt panels and 12V sealed lead acid 100 aH batteries at each of my locations. This is an old video, so I'm sure you've learned all that by now, though.
Another good tip is to use a MPPT charge controller. A PWM controller like you've used brings the voltage of the panel down to your battery voltage. If you have a larger voltage panel (18V, 24V, 30V+) the MPPT controller can use that to increase your charge current to your battery which would otherwise be limited by the PWM controller.
I'm doing the same thing on my property in Central Texas were I hunt with old Linksys routers wrt54g and I just put a small capacitor in line to keep the voltage from dropping. I have multiple cameras on my deer blind that shoot a signal back to my cabin with directional antennas about 250 yards. works great. Ubiquiti is the future for sure but to rich for my blood. I get the old Linksys routers at Ham Radio festivals for $5 to $10 each. just running Solar for now at the deer blind but plan on putting a small wind turbine up soon for those cloudy days. hope this was useful for someone.
802.3af PoE standard is 15 watts at 44-57 volts DC, 350 ma. 802.3at or PoE+ is up to 25 watts, which would be less than 500 ma. Many manufacturers do not follow the standard, though, and Ubiquiti doesn't seem to publish how much power its PoE adapters are capable of supplying. While regular USB 2.0 is 5 v @ 1.5 A (7.5 watts) and special charger ports can go a little over 2.0 A, the ALLPOWER's USB port is actually capable of 3 A or 15 watts. Ubiquity does publish power consumption for a couple of their other PoE access points (The AirGateway Installer is pretty much the same, with the added USB power option) as being 4-6 watts. Its doubtful the AirGateway pulls the full 3 A from the USB port. Even so, subtract the power used by the AirGateway, then the NanoStation's 6.5 watts from the approx. 10 watts left, and that doesn't leave a lot for your camera.
I am not as skilled as you are at computer networking but this I know about POE (Power Over Ethernet) wiring:CAT wire is small guage, intended for low-power electrical signals You can feed 1amp or so over short distances, but longer distances make the voltage drop through the wire significantly. The more amperage you try to draw, the greater the voltage drop.There is an advantage to going to higher voltages - 24 or 48 volts vs. 12 volts. Using simple numbers, if your device requires 48 watts to operate, that means 1 amp at 48 volts (which 18 or 20 guage wire handles well over short distances). However, at 12 volts it would require 4 amps of current, which will overheat small guage wire and create significant voltage drop (transmission loss). You have to minimize amperage or use heavier wire (possibly good quality Cat7) to improve the power available at the receiving end.Enjoyed your video.
I have been using the UBNT products for over 10 years love how easy they are to setup. They have such a wide array of options on what you can do with them as far as range. But you should know that these products are commercial quality and have up to 10 mile range on some of the larger ones!
Please add fuses throughout the system to avoid burning up your forest. Use 0.5A fuse for the Nanostation, as close as possible to the power source, 1A fuse for each solar panel, and 5A fuse between the change controller and the battery.
you can use these fuses and holders ,www.amazon.com/KO-Fuse-Inline-Glass-Holder/dp/B01FWR5H4E/ref=sr_1_24?ie=UTF8&qid=1502072932&sr=8-24&keywords=.5A%2Bfuse&th=1 i prefer to use www.amazon.com/dp/B071VRSYTT?psc=1 these can be found at various prices, and they use standard automotive blade fuses. I like these as they seem to last longer, for the other style even with in a box I find they can tend to oxidize a fair bit (especially with high moisture, and thus would keep an eye on it/use good electrical tape to help seal it a little bit. also instead of an inverter to run the camera i would suggest a boost converter just depends on how much power the camera needs. idea: www.amazon.com/dp/B00J1X4XXM/ref=twister_B06XPF361C?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
I work with a non-profit organization that maintains a camp facility in an off-grid environment, so we rely on solar power. I have a wireless bridge setup (actually, it is three wireless bridges in series) to obtain Internet access from approximately 12 miles away. I sized the battery for 3 sunless days. When sizing solar, you should always based the calculations on winter months because that is when you have the least amount of sun. You also want to have an idea of how many sunless days you expect to experience, because storm systems can leave you without sunlight for an extended period of time, depending on what region you are in. Based on the battery size and the load size, the solar array size needed can be calculated. Just google online solar calculator. Plug in the values and the calculator will give you the configuration you need. You will need to know your load size (use a Kilowatt meter to determine how much power your load is consuming--this is much more accurate than reading the device specs because the device specs gives you maximum and/or minimum consumption), the number of winter sunlight you receive per day (most online solar calculators have maps that will show this for the region you are in), and the number of sunless days you want to be able to handle.
Thanks for the feedback Scott - do you have a link to an online solar calculator for what I'm trying to do? All of the calculators that I'm seeing are for whole home solar estimation.
24v MPPT control works I have built 3 towers that run like this for about a year, all good still running. It is running 1 x 400 Power Beam and 1 x 5m for the AP.
14:15 put a second 12v battery in series for 24v then you could run the camera power right off the batteries, no inverter needed, same with the air gateway, assuming they can handle the charging voltage of the charge controller.
And even with 2 batteries in series you'd still need some sort of voltage regulator in place because the battery voltage would bounce from 20-28 ish volts depending on charge.
6:09 As you said... That box is key!! I'd like to keep the solar system all 12V. I have a 12v POE switch, but most wireless bridges I am finding are 24V! That's pretty cool it takes USB and outputs 24V
Thanks for sharing - that setup with the camera is quite an inspiration. Angle-wise, in winter you have less intensity to / exposure from the sun as it sits deeper on the horizon and comes in weaker through a "thicker" atmosphere.
for you ,getting a few simple "USB power banks" will take the fluctuating power and make it smoother for your kit, OC if your kit is 12v dc powered then it becomes easier as you can then use cheap 12v dc power splitters directly
I've built a similar system for a solar powered web cam that has been running over a year. I've had really good luck with the renology panels sold on Amazon, great quality at a great price. Also, for your battery calculations, for long term reliability of a deep cycle battery you should only be using 25% of its capacity on the regular. So determine the electrical load of the devices (plus probably 20% for losses due to efficiency) for the dark hours of the day and then multiply that by 4. That is, at a minimum, the size battery you should be using. Then size your solar panel to provide enough power for your daylight demand plus enough extra to recover the losses of the night before. By using a deep cycle battery and then sizing it at 4-5 times you daily demand you'll build in some tolerance for rainy/dark days while ensuring you'll get years of service from your batteries.
I don't want to be a downer, but for 50' you can do this a heck of lot cheaper with some bulk cat 5 cable and a couple of ends. That said, I've implemented this a couple of times for clients in a much simpler fashion. Set your solar up for 24v with a charge controller that has a 24v DC output. Connect the DC output to a passive POE injector and connect your UBNT gear. You are losing a lot of power in the USB to 24v conversion when a second battery would do the trick. All you need for battery is a couple of 12v 7.2AH batteries.
Is the battery a deep-discharge gel battery? If not you probably won't get a huge amount of life out of it in this application. Electric fence batteries or caravan/boat leisure batteries will probably be your best bet.
Great Video!! This is an excellent Idea. Also could you do a video over the Cacti setup? Monitoring the remote solar side is definitely important. Thanks for the great coverage.
And yes. do not hook up an inverter to the power out side of the harbor freight charge controller. a 12 volt cigarette lighter plug and a USB converter plugged into that would most likely supply the amps needed. if not like I said in my previous comment. put a capacitor in line to keep the voltage from dropping.
IP Cameras are usually 48v active POE so i wouldnt advice putting 24v into one. Could also power your nano station from a dc-dc 12v to 24v step up regulator straight off the battery then put the power through a passive 12v poe injector. Cheers.
Chris instead of the Raspberry Pi you could use UNMS as that logs 24/7, i have a UNMS server setup on a $5 droplet with the free credit i got by using the link from an earlier video. The unms also runs a ping and alerts when the station goes off line, a very good feature as it alerted me to the Nano Beams i look after going off line when someone switched the wrong socket off
Hey Chris, great Video thanks. I have looked at the data sheets for the products that you used and think you will be running into a power issue. -- The charge controller can output a max of 3A at 5v (assume you can get max 2A per port) this gives you max 10W per port -- The Nano Station M5 needs 8W max (Nanostation Data sheet) -- G3 Camera needs 4W max (G3 camera Data sheet) -- Loses in cable and AirGateway Installer - a little bit (assume 0.5w) Max demand is 12.5W, max supply is 10W. Looks a bit short and probably the reason the camera powers up, but as soon as it starts to do something that requires a bit of power it shuts down. I agree with previous comments that you should avoid an inverter as they are inefficient. Another option that you could consider is to install a second AirGateway Installer to power the camera and do not use the PoE passthrough on the NanoStation. This will allow you to use both USB ports on the Charge controller. Although you will need to run additional network cabling, this should only be locally to the Nanostation/camera/battery box setup. Cheers, Matt
Thanks for the feedback, and for doing the math. That makes sense. The next version will have a better charge controller, and a direct DC PoE injector.
I'm looking to set up a system like this for people who work out in the field on farms. So that way they can have wifi from their house all the way out in their fields. I'm trying to make it reasonably a good price. Any ideas that would be best for that or would nano stations be better.
I know this is an old video, I just wanted to find out what happened to the airGateway Installer Pro's? They seem to be replaced with AirCube ISP? Although the AirCube ISP version is powered by 5v Micro they don't seem to be able to power anything by POE without also having passthrough POE. What happened and what is the latest way of achieving the same goal?
Cool to see the USB can power the nano! I agree with the other commenters don't go DC to AC back to DC, it's a waist of energy. Get the DC poe injector.
I think one case this will come in really handy is when you have a mesh AP somewhere super remote, then you won't need to run any cable at all to such AP
Dude so many DC voltage conversions is going to kill your runtime. Basically, you are converting 12V to 5V at the charge controller, back up to the output of the installer device(24V?) then back down to 5V at the nanostation(internally). Even with high efficiency converters, that's about 10% power loss at each conversion. Here is a list of suggestions on how to make this run longer with less equipment. 1. First and foremost, DO NOT run a Nanostation with two 12V batteries wired in series as you mentioned in the video. That will put the voltage higher than the absolute max voltage for a Nanostation. Doing this will damage your device. Never feed more than 24V to an Airmax device. For multiple batteries, keep them in parallel. 2. The first thing to do in a solar project is to find out your power needs. I'm currently building a lithium battery based solution for an AREDN.org project. A Nanostation will run reliably from just 6V to a maximum of 24V, with current ranging from 200 to 400mA depending on the voltage being used, and it has an average power consumption of 2.5W. 3. Now that you know the power requirement you can calculate the battery and the solar capacities needed. Use Watt/hour as your power unit to determine power production/storage/consumption/days without sun/inefficiencies, etc. Also, lead/acid batteries should only be used to just 50% of its capacity, in other words, whatever is your battery capacity need is, double that up. 4. Due to the broad operating voltage range of the Nanostation, you can run it directly off the 12V battery and avoid most of those DC voltage conversion losses. Can use one of those passive injectors from WiFi Texas... 5. Please do not use an inverter to power the factory AC POE injector. That will take power inefficiency to a whole new level.
Running a DC to DC converter set at correct voltage can easily maintain 24v or needed voltage regardless of extra charging voltage etc. Wifi Texas products work great. Lithium batteries don't like cold, and won't charge in cold. If you need batteries to operate use an AGM or Sealed Lead Acid. But be sure to compensate for lower voltages and capacities in cold weather.
MZR, thanks for the tip. How do I wire directly between the battery and Nanostation? My Nanostation and battery will be about 6' apart, also plan to run a couple POE cameras, can more than one POE camera be plugged into the station (solar) side?
Could you shoot me an email or private message? I am really interested in a solution like this with a really good use case and I feel like I could learn a lot from you. You can email me @ support@skymount.tech and I'll reply from my personal email on the same domain.
The power requirements for your system. The charge controller USB port is 5 volts 3 amps, 15 watts. The Ubiquiti AirGateway Installer converts the 5 volts to 24 volts. Conversion efficiency is unknown. So estimate conversion rate 90%. So this gives us 13.5 watts of usable power. The Ubiquiti NanoStation M5 station uses 8 watts maximum. This leaves 5.5 watts of power for the camera. The camera will draw any were from 4 to 12 watts. Then the Ubiquiti AirGateway may only be able to supply 12 watts at most.
Those last 2 outlets on the controller are used to power a couple of led lights, the inverter should be connected directly to the battery. Love your videos btw
All PoE devices are able to be powered up to the max distance of 100m, also being able to tolerate the power loss generated by distances of up to 100m.
Great testing setup, I love seeing gear being tried and tested before being sold. I had never seen the USB power before, I'm going to be ordering one. What sort of battery are you using? If it's lead acid be careful of deep discharge, the load output should be protected against deep discharge but I'm not sure about the USB. Could the camera not be working due to voltage drop over the relatively long run?
I'd be interested to know what the actual draw is from the nanostation; how much power is it actually using? I'm sure it'll vary slightly with network activity but the number should be fairly similar over a period of hours. I'm considering nanostations for my remote camera stations, which are will be solar powered. Interested to know how much more panel capacity I need for the nanostation in addition to my camera.
Great video, keep up the good work. But at the beginning you sad it's powering the nanostation. You could try to hook a poe injector to the battery. Something like: ALFA APoE08. But there is then no protection for deep uncharging. So you should connect it to the charge controller load side that should output 12V. There are also some solarpanels and battery for 24V. Some ubiquiti devices need the 24V volts or what you can to ist to put two 12v battery in a row to get 24v.
Thanks once again Chris for your great videos! After watching your video I was thinking that if the Nanostation and Camera were closer to the "solar stuff" you _may_ have have better success. My thinking is with the length of wire you have running you are experiencing a voltage drop (And current) due to the natural resistance of the Cat6 cable.
The double conversion using the inverter and then POE power supply costs you power. You can get efficient up-converter power supplies from Ebay that regulate despite the battery voltage going low or high. You also want a low-voltage disconnect on your charge regulator. Finally, don't put electronics inside the battery box! Battery out-gassing corrodes electronics and make you cry. Get and external weather box for your stuff. Did I mention grounding? Drop me a note.
What I'm familiar with are bare boards from Ebay. You need about 5A for Station and camera: www.ebay.com/itm/DC-9-20V-12v-Step-up-to-24v-Converter-Regulator-5A-120W-Power-Supply-Adapter-/172765818337 There's more to it than meets the eye. aly (edited with new link)
I have heard for a long time that the nanostations will run directly from 12vdc. I have never tried it myself, just read about it all over the ubnt forums. Or you can get an upcoverter and hook it to the battery that will take the 12vdc and up it to 24vdc. Please add some fuses to the circuit. One at the battery and any loads connected. A simple ato fuse holder from autozone will work. Can you do a video on the PI and cati setup?
Use a second PoE injector to go from the USB solar charge controller port #2 to another RJ45 cable going over to the camera. Then separate out the PoE wires and the signal wires so you can still have it going to the nanostation. Alternatively, if you have enough power available from the PoE converter, just splice out the voltage wires to the camera instead of trying "passthrough mode". The reason both solutions include having to splice is: Why do you have your solar panel and battery box so far from everything? Group them all together and then you won't have wires going everywhere, inefficiencies, and splicing to deal with. Also, the nanostation is not the most power efficient device, they sell point to point devices that take much less power.
Hey Chris! Why you don't try the Ubiquiti Solar equipment? It will be really nice to combine sunMAX with airMAX and UniFi products for deployments like the one you talked in the video.
Also after watching another thing to test is to use a 12v car socket high output 2 amp output max usb charger to allow for the added power. It might be that the charge controller is using less than 1 amp to power the nano station and adding the extra will give the POE injector more power to draw from. USB Adaptor: www.amazon.com/STANLEY-PIUSB2S-12V-Dual-Charger/dp/B00PF9RCBQ/ref=sr_1_29?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1502084853&sr=1-29&keywords=12+volt+2+amp+usb+charger 12 Volt Car Female Power Adapter bare wires: www.amazon.com/SMAKN-Cigarette-Lighter-Connector-Adapter/dp/B00RT5TE5Q/ref=sr_1_45?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1502085026&sr=1-45&keywords=12+volt+car+adapter
Power straight from battery to a cheap dc to dc converter/regulator with sufficient power (amps) for the station and camera. My guess it´s the USB ports on solar charge controller don't have sufficient amps.
This is a question not regarding your system I wanted to know if if it's possible to run Wi-Fi without hooking up to net. so I can run local systems at home. What systems would work two routers?
Wifi is a wireless network connection...that's it. It's usually used to access the internet, but only if internet access is available. You can use any wifi devices that work together USB dongles, routers, other devices with built in wifi etc.
you can use DC-DC converter and hook it directly to any passive poe connector or you can make double rj45 female and with some soldering to pin 4 and 8 , everything will work just fine , instead of buying 44$ poe from ubnt , nice setup mate
So you run a network connection wire to the wireless device to power the wireless network connection bridge. How about just running the network connection on the required network wire? You could eliminate a nanostation.
The point is, there may not be a wire to use. He is illustrating a wireless bridge like between 2 buildings etc. 2 separate wired networks linked together wirelessly.
Check out Wifi-Texas Passive PoE injectors. No 5V to PoE conversion would be needed if your radios will take a 12V input. Personally, most battery backup systems I deal with are 48V telecom standard so make a things easier that way.
I had to use them engineer a solution to convert Passive 48V B from a PoE switch to 48V A to power a Cambium radio. I've used several of the PoE passive panels (I much prefer a PoE switch where possible though).
Hey Chris, did you measure the power going to JUST the M5 on the solar side WITHOUT the camera? This could be easily done by putting a clamp meter on the positive pair of the cat5e cable to measure the current. Assuming 24 volts, for each 0.5A that would be 12 watts. You have 4x that going into the battery for 6 hours so the solar side would be able to keep up with the .30 M5. Also, you don't have traffic on the solar side of the bridge, you really should for a load test. The inverter powered PoE injector may fix your issue in the short term, but the additional camera DC load plus additional draw based on wifi traffic will probably consume more power than your solar system can supply. I might suggest a single 100 watt panel with a MPPT charge controller to boost efficiency of energy transfer into the battery to support the power load on the M5 plus camera, plus inverter, plus PoE injector on the .30 side. I am planning a similar bridge setup for about 275 feet with the remote end powered by solar, so your findings are VERY helpful....DD
The Ubiquiti AirGateway Installer has been discontinued. Does anybody know of an alternative that can take the 5VDC and provide POE for the exterior antenna? Will an upconverter work (efficiently)?
I don't know if anyone else has said it. But with the m2 /m5 nano stations that close together you need to turn down the tx power. This would also save on battery usaget
Is this for real? Its seems that the solar panel farther than the other nano station why not run the cable their directly? Whats exactly the use of the nano station there?
Definitely need to upgrade battery connections because in low voltage ampacity is king. Alligator clips don't have much contact area and express excess current through heat. I'd also try a USB combiner (i.e. ASIN B00ZUE6PVE) to get full 3A available to POE injector before wasting power on an inverter. Others had suggested DC-DC converters but they're not so cuddly as USB. But they do make professional units, like CUI Inc just down the road from you, for industrial applications in DIN and chassis mount so your clients won't see a spaghetti of wires and bare boards.
You could use 12 volts on ubnt products without problems. Just use an simple poe injector, or build one with RJ45 jacks, and conect it direct to battery. You will get much more efficiency on you sistem.
The passthrough shuld drop 0.7 volts or less, with 11.3v the ubnt shuld still runing. Inside the ubnt product it uses only 5 and 3.3v, in this old table you could see thar 10.5v are enought to run the internals step-down regulators. dl.ubnt.com/wiki/UBNT-AOS_prod-specs-gen_5.pdf
Is that also true for a Unifi Camera? If so you'd have a combined max wattage of 12W, which at 12V would be 1 amp. With 24AWG cables you'd need to keep your cable runs below around 20 ft in order to be able to still have 10.5V available at the other end with a 1amp load. Seems perfectly doable.
I'm wondering if someone has a kit where we can just setup our WI-FI router off grid on solar? I want to have enough batteries so when they are charged up could operate the system for a minimum a week max a month, we're in north central Florida
As for not being able to run the antenna and camera at the same time, the USB port on the charge controller most likely doesn't put out enough amps for this.
What would be really valuable would be if you could detail out the charge/consumption. You made a comment earlier that you had 4 bars, and it basically never went below 3 bars (assuming 100% -> 75%). This to me means that you could use about half of the power that you have, and still have plenty to spare. Please make sure that you measure the power consumption, and the charge speed. Here is my problem: I love the idea, and I want to do something similar on my lands, but I need for it to be small and cheap. Looking at the components the battery is going to be the most expensive thing, and then I need to find a suitable solar panel. The solar panels, that are available are either like 15-20w or 100w. The 100w ones are 40"-50" in height, and that's just not reasonable to set up in a forest or in a yeard, but about half that would work fine. So the question is, could this be done with smaller panel, smaller battery?
I would agree with this as well... the USB output on the charge controller is probably .5 maybe 1A... the AirGateway Installer needs 2A... how about a 12v to 5v car adapter? just make sure it outputs at least 2A... Edit: oops, just looked the the charge controller specs, says 3A... hmmm...
First you are trying to power to much over a 24 GA wire in the Cat 5 cable. It may work better if you had a bigger wire for your power. You just can't run much power on the small wires.
it's easy to know how log can the router run with the batteries solely. Let's say you have a 70ah battery at 12v.. 70*12= 840 watts hour.. Let's say the router use 10watts to operate... 840/10=84 hours of electricity for that 10 watts router... Now there are losses due inefficiency of the components (inverters) but this should give you a hint of how long you could possible run this without charging the batteries.
Eh, sort off. You also have to take into account which batteries he's using. If he's not using deep cycle cells, he won't get much more than 20% of the rate AH, without ruining the battery.
Yes, I know I'm just explaining how can anyone get an estimate... There are many other factors to take in consideration to nail the real numbers. For what he explained in the video he is already ruining the battery tho...
Yeah, looks like you could run an Arduino in ultra low power mode with an ethernet shield and 25v sensor and have it wake up every x minutes to measure the battery voltage. Could even trigger a deep discharge protection latching relay too :) www.home-automation-community.com/arduino-low-power-how-to-run-atmega328p-for-a-year-on-coin-cell-battery/
Here's my idea... lol: Unfortunately, it requires 2 12v batteries wired in series (24v), then 2ire 2 of your solar panels in series for 24v (Your charge controller should automatically sense 24v or have an option after hooking up the batteries). Then hook up your nano station directly to the "load" on the charge controller. NEAT thing about that scenario is you can automatically program the charge controller to shut down overnight or come on a dawn.. consequently conserving power.
just looked at the manual on this charge controller... You can safely hook up all 3 of your HF solar panels in series to make 36v, the controller will adjust to 24v BUT you'll still need to have at least x2 12v batteries in series.
What's the real world scenario here? Solar powered pole mounted camera in say a parking lot or something? Just curious if you're doing it for fun or if there's a real world scenario you're trying to prove out.
I'm mostly doing this to learn - I learn best by actually doing it. Next version of this setup will be much better due to my experimenting around with what I have an all of the awesome feedback I have been receiving.
Hello mates, I'm keen to know how to convert DC-RF signal at the solar panel ?? Can anyone please explain me and can we do simulation for this project by using MATLAB/SIMULINK ???
Hey Chris, take a look at this thing: tyconsystems.com/index.php/dc-passive-gigabit/501-tp-dcdc-1224g Connect it to the Inverter connectors on the solar charger. It also includes a voltage booster for the Nanostation Also, if you look on the Ubiquiti forums, there is some problems with the airgateway installer not providing enough power output to run things when running a speed test etc.
Jays Tech we did consider the tycoon power source. There was two factors in not using them, 1: cost! They are more expensive than the installer pro device. Ultimately these will be used a dense network with about 100 devices being installed thus cost is important. 2: we wanted to review the Ubiquiti installer pro and give people a basic use case for it.
Thanks for the link! Much appreciated...this looks like a great long-term solution for a permanent installation. I threw one on my Amazon wish list so that I don't forget about it.
Nice T-shirt. Phish? Now, this seems like way overkill. You should be able to run your bridge on 5V/1amp DC (that is only 5 watts DC!). You can buy a solar charger for like $20 that will charge a Li Ion batter that would power that for 24 hours. Everything you are running is very low power. What is going to suck up the power is things like an inverter (which has to physically create an AC phase) and anything that requires physical motion - like a compressor for an AC. There are some free or low cost books are solar you can learn about some of this stuff. I'm certainly not an expert (like you I was an IT - computer programmer) but I'd start with some basics about electricity and battery tech. Quick, easy reading with basic mathematics. It will take you far in this journey.
Too many comments to read through, so I don't know if anyone else has suggested this. From your battery, you could use a 48V DC converter (12V to 48V) and from there, connect a UniFi US8-60W. From there, connect your Nanostation. That would also give you enough power on your PoE passthrough to power your UVC or other PoE camera. That has been working great for me. I currently use 100 watt panels and 12V sealed lead acid 100 aH batteries at each of my locations. This is an old video, so I'm sure you've learned all that by now, though.
Another good tip is to use a MPPT charge controller. A PWM controller like you've used brings the voltage of the panel down to your battery voltage. If you have a larger voltage panel (18V, 24V, 30V+) the MPPT controller can use that to increase your charge current to your battery which would otherwise be limited by the PWM controller.
I'm doing the same thing on my property in Central Texas were I hunt with old Linksys routers wrt54g and I just put a small capacitor in line to keep the voltage from dropping. I have multiple cameras on my deer blind that shoot a signal back to my cabin with directional antennas about 250 yards. works great. Ubiquiti is the future for sure but to rich for my blood. I get the old Linksys routers at Ham Radio festivals for $5 to $10 each. just running Solar for now at the deer blind but plan on putting a small wind turbine up soon for those cloudy days. hope this was useful for someone.
802.3af PoE standard is 15 watts at 44-57 volts DC, 350 ma. 802.3at or PoE+ is up to 25 watts, which would be less than 500 ma. Many manufacturers do not follow the standard, though, and Ubiquiti doesn't seem to publish how much power its PoE adapters are capable of supplying.
While regular USB 2.0 is 5 v @ 1.5 A (7.5 watts) and special charger ports can go a little over 2.0 A, the ALLPOWER's USB port is actually capable of 3 A or 15 watts. Ubiquity does publish power consumption for a couple of their other PoE access points (The AirGateway Installer is pretty much the same, with the added USB power option) as being 4-6 watts. Its doubtful the AirGateway pulls the full 3 A from the USB port. Even so, subtract the power used by the AirGateway, then the NanoStation's 6.5 watts from the approx. 10 watts left, and that doesn't leave a lot for your camera.
exactly what I was going to start looking into. Really enjoying all the new content here lately. Thank you!
Thanks!
Thanks Friend, you started a conversation that brought out some great minds. The comments are top notch. Stay Savvy !
I am not as skilled as you are at computer networking but this I know about POE (Power Over Ethernet) wiring:CAT wire is small guage, intended for low-power electrical signals You can feed 1amp or so over short distances, but longer distances make the voltage drop through the wire significantly. The more amperage you try to draw, the greater the voltage drop.There is an advantage to going to higher voltages - 24 or 48 volts vs. 12 volts. Using simple numbers, if your device requires 48 watts to operate, that means 1 amp at 48 volts (which 18 or 20 guage wire handles well over short distances). However, at 12 volts it would require 4 amps of current, which will overheat small guage wire and create significant voltage drop (transmission loss). You have to minimize amperage or use heavier wire (possibly good quality Cat7) to improve the power available at the receiving end.Enjoyed your video.
Great feedback - thanks!
Tom Kelly yes yes yes, voltage drop is one of the key factors here..... along with what everyone else has been inputting.
I have been using the UBNT products for over 10 years love how easy they are to setup. They have such a wide array of options on what you can do with them as far as range. But you should know that these products are commercial quality and have up to 10 mile range on some of the larger ones!
Please add fuses throughout the system to avoid burning up your forest. Use 0.5A fuse for the Nanostation, as close as possible to the power source, 1A fuse for each solar panel, and 5A fuse between the change controller and the battery.
MZR0682 thank you for the tip. Fuses are very important and will be used if this were a permanent/long term project.
Do you have any Amazon links to fuses that you would recommend?
you can use these fuses and holders ,www.amazon.com/KO-Fuse-Inline-Glass-Holder/dp/B01FWR5H4E/ref=sr_1_24?ie=UTF8&qid=1502072932&sr=8-24&keywords=.5A%2Bfuse&th=1 i prefer to use www.amazon.com/dp/B071VRSYTT?psc=1 these can be found at various prices, and they use standard automotive blade fuses. I like these as they seem to last longer, for the other style even with in a box I find they can tend to oxidize a fair bit (especially with high moisture, and thus would keep an eye on it/use good electrical tape to help seal it a little bit. also instead of an inverter to run the camera i would suggest a boost converter just depends on how much power the camera needs. idea: www.amazon.com/dp/B00J1X4XXM/ref=twister_B06XPF361C?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
I work with a non-profit organization that maintains a camp facility in an off-grid environment, so we rely on solar power. I have a wireless bridge setup (actually, it is three wireless bridges in series) to obtain Internet access from approximately 12 miles away.
I sized the battery for 3 sunless days. When sizing solar, you should always based the calculations on winter months because that is when you have the least amount of sun. You also want to have an idea of how many sunless days you expect to experience, because storm systems can leave you without sunlight for an extended period of time, depending on what region you are in.
Based on the battery size and the load size, the solar array size needed can be calculated. Just google online solar calculator. Plug in the values and the calculator will give you the configuration you need. You will need to know your load size (use a Kilowatt meter to determine how much power your load is consuming--this is much more accurate than reading the device specs because the device specs gives you maximum and/or minimum consumption), the number of winter sunlight you receive per day (most online solar calculators have maps that will show this for the region you are in), and the number of sunless days you want to be able to handle.
Thanks for the feedback Scott - do you have a link to an online solar calculator for what I'm trying to do? All of the calculators that I'm seeing are for whole home solar estimation.
www.altestore.com/store/calculators/off_grid_calculator/
www.altenergydesign.com/offgrid.html
This is the same calculator, but in a minimalist page design.
24v MPPT control works I have built 3 towers that run like this for about a year, all good still running. It is running 1 x 400 Power Beam and 1 x 5m for the AP.
Try to avoid an inverter. Your taking DC converting to AC and back to DC for the devices. Highly inefficient.
True
Solution?
14:15 put a second 12v battery in series for 24v then you could run the camera power right off the batteries, no inverter needed, same with the air gateway, assuming they can handle the charging voltage of the charge controller.
i think the problem would be the POE injector only being able to run the one device not 2
You wouldn't need the injector in that case. The PoE injector is just a 5v->24v boost converter. :)
And even with 2 batteries in series you'd still need some sort of voltage regulator in place because the battery voltage would bounce from 20-28 ish volts depending on charge.
True
As long as they don't cook at 28 volts, 20 volts is no problem, anything over 15 volts works.
6:09 As you said... That box is key!! I'd like to keep the solar system all 12V. I have a 12v POE switch, but most wireless bridges I am finding are 24V! That's pretty cool it takes USB and outputs 24V
Thanks for sharing - that setup with the camera is quite an inspiration. Angle-wise, in winter you have less intensity to / exposure from the sun as it sits deeper on the horizon and comes in weaker through a "thicker" atmosphere.
for you ,getting a few simple "USB power banks" will take the fluctuating power and make it smoother for your kit, OC if your kit is 12v dc powered then it becomes easier as you can then use cheap 12v dc power splitters directly
I've built a similar system for a solar powered web cam that has been running over a year. I've had really good luck with the renology panels sold on Amazon, great quality at a great price.
Also, for your battery calculations, for long term reliability of a deep cycle battery you should only be using 25% of its capacity on the regular. So determine the electrical load of the devices (plus probably 20% for losses due to efficiency) for the dark hours of the day and then multiply that by 4. That is, at a minimum, the size battery you should be using.
Then size your solar panel to provide enough power for your daylight demand plus enough extra to recover the losses of the night before.
By using a deep cycle battery and then sizing it at 4-5 times you daily demand you'll build in some tolerance for rainy/dark days while ensuring you'll get years of service from your batteries.
Great feedback - thanks!
I dig your honesty on everything, even the affiliate links! Subscribed! :-)
I don't want to be a downer, but for 50' you can do this a heck of lot cheaper with some bulk cat 5 cable and a couple of ends. That said, I've implemented this a couple of times for clients in a much simpler fashion. Set your solar up for 24v with a charge controller that has a 24v DC output. Connect the DC output to a passive POE injector and connect your UBNT gear. You are losing a lot of power in the USB to 24v conversion when a second battery would do the trick. All you need for battery is a couple of 12v 7.2AH batteries.
Is the battery a deep-discharge gel battery?
If not you probably won't get a huge amount of life out of it in this application.
Electric fence batteries or caravan/boat leisure batteries will probably be your best bet.
Not a deep discharge gel battery - this is a cheap one. Thanks for your feedback!
Great Video!! This is an excellent Idea. Also could you do a video over the Cacti setup? Monitoring the remote solar side is definitely important. Thanks for the great coverage.
And yes. do not hook up an inverter to the power out side of the harbor freight charge controller. a 12 volt cigarette lighter plug and a USB converter plugged into that would most likely supply the amps needed. if not like I said in my previous comment. put a capacitor in line to keep the voltage from dropping.
IP Cameras are usually 48v active POE so i wouldnt advice putting 24v into one. Could also power your nano station from a dc-dc 12v to 24v step up regulator straight off the battery then put the power through a passive 12v poe injector. Cheers.
Chris instead of the Raspberry Pi you could use UNMS as that logs 24/7, i have a UNMS server setup on a $5 droplet with the free credit i got by using the link from an earlier video. The unms also runs a ping and alerts when the station goes off line, a very good feature as it alerted me to the Nano Beams i look after going off line when someone switched the wrong socket off
7:17 What's the white box? Why not plug the blue cat5 directly into the black box?
Hey Chris, great Video thanks.
I have looked at the data sheets for the products that you used and think you will be running into a power issue.
-- The charge controller can output a max of 3A at 5v (assume you can get max 2A per port) this gives you max 10W per port
-- The Nano Station M5 needs 8W max (Nanostation Data sheet)
-- G3 Camera needs 4W max (G3 camera Data sheet)
-- Loses in cable and AirGateway Installer - a little bit (assume 0.5w)
Max demand is 12.5W, max supply is 10W. Looks a bit short and probably the reason the camera powers up, but as soon as it starts to do something that requires a bit of power it shuts down.
I agree with previous comments that you should avoid an inverter as they are inefficient. Another option that you could consider is to install a second AirGateway Installer to power the camera and do not use the PoE passthrough on the NanoStation. This will allow you to use both USB ports on the Charge controller. Although you will need to run additional network cabling, this should only be locally to the Nanostation/camera/battery box setup.
Cheers,
Matt
Thanks for the feedback, and for doing the math. That makes sense. The next version will have a better charge controller, and a direct DC PoE injector.
I'm looking to set up a system like this for people who work out in the field on farms. So that way they can have wifi from their house all the way out in their fields. I'm trying to make it reasonably a good price. Any ideas that would be best for that or would nano stations be better.
I know this is an old video, I just wanted to find out what happened to the airGateway Installer Pro's?
They seem to be replaced with AirCube ISP? Although the AirCube ISP version is powered by 5v Micro they don't seem to be able to power anything by POE without also having passthrough POE.
What happened and what is the latest way of achieving the same goal?
Cool to see the USB can power the nano! I agree with the other commenters don't go DC to AC back to DC, it's a waist of energy. Get the DC poe injector.
Hi and thanks for awesome videos. Question, given you are an avid Ubiquiti user. You never thought of using the AIRMax products for this project?
I think one case this will come in really handy is when you have a mesh AP somewhere super remote, then you won't need to run any cable at all to such AP
Dude so many DC voltage conversions is going to kill your runtime. Basically, you are converting 12V to 5V at the charge controller, back up to the output of the installer device(24V?) then back down to 5V at the nanostation(internally). Even with high efficiency converters, that's about 10% power loss at each conversion.
Here is a list of suggestions on how to make this run longer with less equipment.
1. First and foremost, DO NOT run a Nanostation with two 12V batteries wired in series as you mentioned in the video. That will put the voltage higher than the absolute max voltage for a Nanostation. Doing this will damage your device. Never feed more than 24V to an Airmax device. For multiple batteries, keep them in parallel.
2. The first thing to do in a solar project is to find out your power needs. I'm currently building a lithium battery based solution for an AREDN.org project. A Nanostation will run reliably from just 6V to a maximum of 24V, with current ranging from 200 to 400mA depending on the voltage being used, and it has an average power consumption of 2.5W.
3. Now that you know the power requirement you can calculate the battery and the solar capacities needed. Use Watt/hour as your power unit to determine power production/storage/consumption/days without sun/inefficiencies, etc. Also, lead/acid batteries should only be used to just 50% of its capacity, in other words, whatever is your battery capacity need is, double that up.
4. Due to the broad operating voltage range of the Nanostation, you can run it directly off the 12V battery and avoid most of those DC voltage conversion losses. Can use one of those passive injectors from WiFi Texas...
5. Please do not use an inverter to power the factory AC POE injector. That will take power inefficiency to a whole new level.
Great feedback - thanks!
Running a DC to DC converter set at correct voltage can easily maintain 24v or needed voltage regardless of extra charging voltage etc. Wifi Texas products work great. Lithium batteries don't like cold, and won't charge in cold. If you need batteries to operate use an AGM or Sealed Lead Acid. But be sure to compensate for lower voltages and capacities in cold weather.
MZR, thanks for the tip. How do I wire directly between the battery and Nanostation? My Nanostation and battery will be about 6' apart, also plan to run a couple POE cameras, can more than one POE camera be plugged into the station (solar) side?
Could you shoot me an email or private message? I am really interested in a solution like this with a really good use case and I feel like I could learn a lot from you. You can email me @ support@skymount.tech and I'll reply from my personal email on the same domain.
MZR0682 love to see what you came up with. I am working on an AREDN setup myself.
The power requirements for your system.
The charge controller USB port is 5 volts 3 amps, 15 watts.
The Ubiquiti AirGateway Installer converts the 5 volts to 24 volts. Conversion efficiency is unknown. So estimate conversion rate 90%. So this gives us 13.5 watts of usable power.
The Ubiquiti NanoStation M5 station uses 8 watts maximum.
This leaves 5.5 watts of power for the camera.
The camera will draw any were from 4 to 12 watts.
Then the Ubiquiti AirGateway may only be able to supply 12 watts at most.
Those last 2 outlets on the controller are used to power a couple of led lights, the inverter should be connected directly to the battery. Love your videos btw
To use PoE passthrough, we need to have a PoE+ source feeding max 30w to the nano station, where 15w max will be drawn by the extension port.
All PoE devices are able to be powered up to the max distance of 100m, also being able to tolerate the power loss generated by distances of up to 100m.
Great testing setup, I love seeing gear being tried and tested before being sold. I had never seen the USB power before, I'm going to be ordering one.
What sort of battery are you using? If it's lead acid be careful of deep discharge, the load output should be protected against deep discharge but I'm not sure about the USB.
Could the camera not be working due to voltage drop over the relatively long run?
Nice video Chris. I believe you need a 1amp POE to use pass through.
I'd be interested to know what the actual draw is from the nanostation; how much power is it actually using? I'm sure it'll vary slightly with network activity but the number should be fairly similar over a period of hours.
I'm considering nanostations for my remote camera stations, which are will be solar powered. Interested to know how much more panel capacity I need for the nanostation in addition to my camera.
gday. and thanks for video. which video presentation software are you using for your presentations?
Great video, keep up the good work. But at the beginning you sad it's powering the nanostation. You could try to hook a poe injector to the battery. Something like: ALFA APoE08.
But there is then no protection for deep uncharging. So you should connect it to the charge controller load side that should output 12V.
There are also some solarpanels and battery for 24V. Some ubiquiti devices need the 24V volts or what you can to ist to put two 12v battery in a row to get 24v.
Thanks once again Chris for your great videos!
After watching your video I was thinking that if the Nanostation and Camera were closer to the "solar stuff" you _may_ have have better success.
My thinking is with the length of wire you have running you are experiencing a voltage drop (And current) due to the natural resistance of the Cat6 cable.
Definitely worth investigating - I'll check that out!
The double conversion using the inverter and then POE power supply costs you power. You can get efficient up-converter power supplies from Ebay that regulate despite the battery voltage going low or high. You also want a low-voltage disconnect on your charge regulator. Finally, don't put electronics inside the battery box! Battery out-gassing corrodes electronics and make you cry. Get and external weather box for your stuff. Did I mention grounding? Drop me a note.
Great feedback - thanks! Do you have an amazon link for the up-converter power supply that you mentioned? I'd love to take a look at it.
What I'm familiar with are bare boards from Ebay. You need about 5A for Station and camera: www.ebay.com/itm/DC-9-20V-12v-Step-up-to-24v-Converter-Regulator-5A-120W-Power-Supply-Adapter-/172765818337 There's more to it than meets the eye. aly (edited with new link)
I just sent you an email
I have heard for a long time that the nanostations will run directly from 12vdc. I have never tried it myself, just read about it all over the ubnt forums. Or you can get an upcoverter and hook it to the battery that will take the 12vdc and up it to 24vdc. Please add some fuses to the circuit. One at the battery and any loads connected. A simple ato fuse holder from autozone will work.
Can you do a video on the PI and cati setup?
Use a second PoE injector to go from the USB solar charge controller port #2 to another RJ45 cable going over to the camera. Then separate out the PoE wires and the signal wires so you can still have it going to the nanostation.
Alternatively, if you have enough power available from the PoE converter, just splice out the voltage wires to the camera instead of trying "passthrough mode".
The reason both solutions include having to splice is: Why do you have your solar panel and battery box so far from everything? Group them all together and then you won't have wires going everywhere, inefficiencies, and splicing to deal with.
Also, the nanostation is not the most power efficient device, they sell point to point devices that take much less power.
Use a buck boost converter on the solar controller output. 12 volt in 24 volt out (adjustable) far more efficient.
Hey Chris! Why you don't try the Ubiquiti Solar equipment? It will be really nice to combine sunMAX with airMAX and UniFi products for deployments like the one you talked in the video.
for a long distance point to point what do you recomend 900mh, 2.4 o 5ghz?
I was scrolling through TH-cam and you put 3 words I love into a Title lol I use the NanoStations in Ham Radio. K7JSP
Chris can you please make a detailed video of cacti and raspi install and use scenario , please please.
Thanks
harsh gupta we will be doing a deep dive into Ubiquiti AirContol soon.
Also after watching another thing to test is to use a 12v car socket high output 2 amp output max usb charger to allow for the added power. It might be that the charge controller is using less than 1 amp to power the nano station and adding the extra will give the POE injector more power to draw from.
USB Adaptor: www.amazon.com/STANLEY-PIUSB2S-12V-Dual-Charger/dp/B00PF9RCBQ/ref=sr_1_29?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1502084853&sr=1-29&keywords=12+volt+2+amp+usb+charger
12 Volt Car Female Power Adapter bare wires: www.amazon.com/SMAKN-Cigarette-Lighter-Connector-Adapter/dp/B00RT5TE5Q/ref=sr_1_45?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1502085026&sr=1-45&keywords=12+volt+car+adapter
Power straight from battery to a cheap dc to dc converter/regulator with sufficient power (amps) for the station and camera. My guess it´s the USB ports on solar charge controller don't have sufficient amps.
What is that White box near 7:20,which has lan cable connection??
harsh gupta it is a RJ45 coupler.
Mayby is the lenght of the network cable to long, to power a secondary device ( camera ).
Try that setup with shorter cabeling.
This is a question not regarding your system I wanted to know if if it's possible to run Wi-Fi without hooking up to net. so I can run local systems at home. What systems would work two routers?
Wifi is a wireless network connection...that's it. It's usually used to access the internet, but only if internet access is available. You can use any wifi devices that work together USB dongles, routers, other devices with built in wifi etc.
you can use DC-DC converter and hook it directly to any passive poe connector or you can make double rj45 female and with some soldering to pin 4 and 8 , everything will work just fine , instead of buying 44$ poe from ubnt , nice setup mate
+hany annan That's what I did in part 2.
So you run a network connection wire to the wireless device to power the wireless network connection bridge. How about just running the network connection on the required network wire? You could eliminate a nanostation.
The point is, there may not be a wire to use. He is illustrating a wireless bridge like between 2 buildings etc. 2 separate wired networks linked together wirelessly.
Check out Wifi-Texas Passive PoE injectors. No 5V to PoE conversion would be needed if your radios will take a 12V input. Personally, most battery backup systems I deal with are 48V telecom standard so make a things easier that way.
Thanks for the tip! Looks like they have some great stuff.
I had to use them engineer a solution to convert Passive 48V B from a PoE switch to 48V A to power a Cambium radio. I've used several of the PoE passive panels (I much prefer a PoE switch where possible though).
I had the exact charge controller. The solar input on my controller is not working after a few days. Do you have why is this so?
Cause it's a piece of crap.
Hey Chris, did you measure the power going to JUST the M5 on the solar side WITHOUT the camera? This could be easily done by putting a clamp meter on the positive pair of the cat5e cable to measure the current. Assuming 24 volts, for each 0.5A that would be 12 watts. You have 4x that going into the battery for 6 hours so the solar side would be able to keep up with the .30 M5. Also, you don't have traffic on the solar side of the bridge, you really should for a load test. The inverter powered PoE injector may fix your issue in the short term, but the additional camera DC load plus additional draw based on wifi traffic will probably consume more power than your solar system can supply. I might suggest a single 100 watt panel with a MPPT charge controller to boost efficiency of energy transfer into the battery to support the power load on the M5 plus camera, plus inverter, plus PoE injector on the .30 side. I am planning a similar bridge setup for about 275 feet with the remote end powered by solar, so your findings are VERY helpful....DD
Thanks for the feedback - the next version will be a big improvement as I learn this stuff - stay tuned!
Excellent video!
The Ubiquiti AirGateway Installer has been discontinued. Does anybody know of an alternative that can take the 5VDC and provide POE for the exterior antenna? Will an upconverter work (efficiently)?
I don't know if anyone else has said it. But with the m2 /m5 nano stations that close together you need to turn down the tx power. This would also save on battery usaget
Also with solar installs I try to keep the cat 6 runs as short as possible. Also have you seen the unifi tough cable. Really good stuff
+Fluzz Yes...power output is down at 0db
Which company made this panels??
Hey Chris what is this name of the App u use to monitor the station ap? i try to make out what u said but can't lol
Cacti
www.cacti.net/
Can you use SNMP to monitor Nanostation voltage.
Is this for real? Its seems that the solar panel farther than the other nano station why not run the cable their directly? Whats exactly the use of the nano station there?
No - this is not a real-world setup...just doing testing.
I see. :) great vids by the way.
Did u see the ubiquiti solar beam?
That is great video and covering much more information. I have a video on my channel on this subject too.
Definitely need to upgrade battery connections because in low voltage ampacity is king. Alligator clips don't have much contact area and express excess current through heat.
I'd also try a USB combiner (i.e. ASIN B00ZUE6PVE) to get full 3A available to POE injector before wasting power on an inverter. Others had suggested DC-DC converters but they're not so cuddly as USB. But they do make professional units, like CUI Inc just down the road from you, for industrial applications in DIN and chassis mount so your clients won't see a spaghetti of wires and bare boards.
Definitely agree on the alligator clips - upgraded connections will be in the next version!
You could use 12 volts on ubnt products without problems. Just use an simple poe injector, or build one with RJ45 jacks, and conect it direct to battery. You will get much more efficiency on you sistem.
Even with POE passthrough enabled on the nanostation?
The passthrough shuld drop 0.7 volts or less, with 11.3v the ubnt shuld still runing. Inside the ubnt product it uses only 5 and 3.3v, in this old table you could see thar 10.5v are enought to run the internals step-down regulators. dl.ubnt.com/wiki/UBNT-AOS_prod-specs-gen_5.pdf
Is that also true for a Unifi Camera?
If so you'd have a combined max wattage of 12W, which at 12V would be 1 amp.
With 24AWG cables you'd need to keep your cable runs below around 20 ft in order to be able to still have 10.5V available at the other end with a 1amp load.
Seems perfectly doable.
Love your videos!
I'm wondering if someone has a kit where we can just setup our WI-FI router off grid on solar? I want to have enough batteries so when they are charged up could operate the system for a minimum a week max a month, we're in north central Florida
As for not being able to run the antenna and camera at the same time, the USB port on the charge controller most likely doesn't put out enough amps for this.
Is this working in Philippines too???
change the PoE, or combine the 2 usb output and hope the usb can provide 1 amp each. you cant powered the nano station and camera with 10watt source
What would be really valuable would be if you could detail out the charge/consumption.
You made a comment earlier that you had 4 bars, and it basically never went below 3 bars (assuming 100% -> 75%). This to me means that you could use about half of the power that you have, and still have plenty to spare. Please make sure that you measure the power consumption, and the charge speed.
Here is my problem: I love the idea, and I want to do something similar on my lands, but I need for it to be small and cheap. Looking at the components the battery is going to be the most expensive thing, and then I need to find a suitable solar panel. The solar panels, that are available are either like 15-20w or 100w. The 100w ones are 40"-50" in height, and that's just not reasonable to set up in a forest or in a yeard, but about half that would work fine.
So the question is, could this be done with smaller panel, smaller battery?
Ubiquiti Fan boy didn't want to use the Ubiquiti solar SunMax? :). Good video!
any idea how to convert dc power straight to poe without inverter?
I would say the limitation is the solar controllers USB output
I would agree with this as well... the USB output on the charge controller is probably .5 maybe 1A... the AirGateway Installer needs 2A... how about a 12v to 5v car adapter? just make sure it outputs at least 2A...
Edit: oops, just looked the the charge controller specs, says 3A... hmmm...
First you are trying to power to much over a 24 GA wire in the Cat 5 cable. It may work better if you had a bigger wire for your power. You just can't run much power on the small wires.
I assume any customer would want at least more than one device under solar power, so why not use a POE switch to power the Nano Station/AP & Cameras?
it's easy to know how log can the router run with the batteries solely. Let's say you have a 70ah battery at 12v..
70*12= 840 watts hour..
Let's say the router use 10watts to operate...
840/10=84 hours of electricity for that 10 watts router... Now there are losses due inefficiency of the components (inverters) but this should give you a hint of how long you could possible run this without charging the batteries.
Eh, sort off. You also have to take into account which batteries he's using. If he's not using deep cycle cells, he won't get much more than 20% of the rate AH, without ruining the battery.
Yes, I know I'm just explaining how can anyone get an estimate... There are many other factors to take in consideration to nail the real numbers. For what he explained in the video he is already ruining the battery tho...
Great Video!
Thank you for this!!!!!
It would be nice to see what the battery percentage is remotely.
Use a battery that you can hook up to the network. Setup alerts when battery drops to a specific percentage.
Yeah, looks like you could run an Arduino in ultra low power mode with an ethernet shield and 25v sensor and have it wake up every x minutes to measure the battery voltage. Could even trigger a deep discharge protection latching relay too :) www.home-automation-community.com/arduino-low-power-how-to-run-atmega328p-for-a-year-on-coin-cell-battery/
Here's my idea... lol: Unfortunately, it requires 2 12v batteries wired in series (24v), then 2ire 2 of your solar panels in series for 24v (Your charge controller should automatically sense 24v or have an option after hooking up the batteries). Then hook up your nano station directly to the "load" on the charge controller. NEAT thing about that scenario is you can automatically program the charge controller to shut down overnight or come on a dawn.. consequently conserving power.
just looked at the manual on this charge controller... You can safely hook up all 3 of your HF solar panels in series to make 36v, the controller will adjust to 24v BUT you'll still need to have at least x2 12v batteries in series.
What if I only need to power a couple of wireless camera instead of POE?
can you tell how to make wireless camera using Raspberry pi
What's the real world scenario here? Solar powered pole mounted camera in say a parking lot or something? Just curious if you're doing it for fun or if there's a real world scenario you're trying to prove out.
I'm mostly doing this to learn - I learn best by actually doing it. Next version of this setup will be much better due to my experimenting around with what I have an all of the awesome feedback I have been receiving.
Heyy chris great video i was wondering do u think this technology can work in a area with bad network coverage?? Or electricity
Hello mates, I'm keen to know how to convert DC-RF signal at the solar panel ?? Can anyone please explain me and can we do simulation for this project by using MATLAB/SIMULINK ???
You should have gotten the ubiquiti panels
very very good project ,,,,,,thanks for sharing
Good video! Thanks
you should have used 24 vol system with poe switch or injector....
Hey Chris, take a look at this thing:
tyconsystems.com/index.php/dc-passive-gigabit/501-tp-dcdc-1224g
Connect it to the Inverter connectors on the solar charger. It also includes a voltage booster for the Nanostation
Also, if you look on the Ubiquiti forums, there is some problems with
the airgateway installer not providing enough power output to run things when running a speed test etc.
Jays Tech we did consider the tycoon power source. There was two factors in not using them, 1: cost! They are more expensive than the installer pro device. Ultimately these will be used a dense network with about 100 devices being installed thus cost is important. 2: we wanted to review the Ubiquiti installer pro and give people a basic use case for it.
Thanks for the link! Much appreciated...this looks like a great long-term solution for a permanent installation. I threw one on my Amazon wish list so that I don't forget about it.
During the day time it's gets 6 hours? How about night
instead of getting an inverter and then the poe injector, just get a dc dc step up converter to 24v and power the poe injector with it!
Should have used one of the ubiquiti 100 Watt Solar Panels ;)
I would certainly try them out...but I think they're a bit pricier than what I am testing.
Sure. But you're "The UBNT guy". Your videos come up anytime I'm trying to figure out anything unifi related.
Nice T-shirt. Phish? Now, this seems like way overkill. You should be able to run your bridge on 5V/1amp DC (that is only 5 watts DC!). You can buy a solar charger for like $20 that will charge a Li Ion batter that would power that for 24 hours. Everything you are running is very low power. What is going to suck up the power is things like an inverter (which has to physically create an AC phase) and anything that requires physical motion - like a compressor for an AC. There are some free or low cost books are solar you can learn about some of this stuff. I'm certainly not an expert (like you I was an IT - computer programmer) but I'd start with some basics about electricity and battery tech. Quick, easy reading with basic mathematics. It will take you far in this journey.