Hypnos board: A low-cost all-in-one solution for environment sensor power management, data storage, and task scheduling

Abstract

Open source in-situ environmental sensor hardware continues to expand across the globe for a variety of applications. Sensor-management systems typically perform three fundamental tasks: sample sensors at a specified time or period, save data onto retrievable media, and switch power to components on and off in between sample cycles to conserve battery energy and increase field operation time. These tasks are commonly accomplished through integrating separate off-the-shelf components into the desired system such as: power relays, SD card hardware, Real-Time Clocks (RTCs), and coin cell batteries. To enable faster prototyping, the Openly Published Environmental Sensing Lab abstracted all of these requirements into a single printed circuit board (PCB), Hypnos, that can be included in any project to achieve these commonly-required capabilities: powering on and off connected sensors on a schedule and logging collected data to the removable SD card. The hardware is laid out in a “Feather” form factor, a popular configuration in the open-source hardware community, to easily mate with other industry standard products. The onboard RTC acts as an alarm clock that wakes a user-attached microprocessor from low-power sleep modes in between sample cycles. By integrating all these components into a single PCB, we save cost while significantly reducing physical system size. The design as well as a suite of code functions that enable the user to configure all the Hypnos board features are detailed.