Back to Smartcitizen.me

Kit 2.3 started running down its battery to 0% after wifi disconnect

Hardware
#1

I was doing maintenance on my home network and had all wifi access points down for 4-5 hours. My SCK kit was plugged into power the entire time. Interestingly, once it lost wifi connection, it started running down the battery (even though it was plugged in).

Weirdly, I did not realize it since it reconnected once network maintenance was done, and resumed data reporting. But for some reason, it continued running on battery until it died a few days later. The only thing that told me this was a battery low alert I got which prompted me to look, but by the time I got home it was dead. I had to unplug/replug it to force a reboot and now it appears the battery is slowly charging again.

Any idea why this happened, and how to prevent it? If this had been a remote sensor without easy access, I would have been screwed.

#2

That’s really strange! Can @adaisuri test with devices in person and try to reproduce?

@nikhil.net can you add your kit ID here?

#3

Sure thing! The kit ID is 18396.

I did find the API access URL and grabbed part of the JSON relating to versions, if that’s at all helpful. That is below:

"hardware": {
    "name": "SmartCitizen Kit 2.3",
    "type": "SCK",
    "version": "2.3",
    "slug": "sck:2,3",
    "last_status_message": {
        "id": "xxxx",
        "mac": "xxxx",
        "time": "2025-12-04T06:12:33Z",
        "esp_bd": "2024-12-09T09:55:44Z",
        "hw_ver": "2.3",
        "rcause": "SYST",
        "sam_bd": "2024-12-09T09:55:15Z",
        "esp_ver": "0.9.9-9256d97-master",
        "sam_ver": "0.9.10-9256d97-master-sck23_air"
    }
},
#4

OK! Maybe colleagues can test it (I can’t access hw for a while).

Also, you can try to reproduce this by changing the Wi-Fi to a different network that you can control when to switch on/off, for instance, by creating an access-point with your phone. Once you change it and check it works, turn off the AP and check for some hours if there is a battery drop. It’s very odd though!

#5

I’ll give this a test. After posting the version info, it did occur to me to check firmware versions, and I did notice that a newer FW was out, so I have updated both the SAM and ESP to the versions below. I’ll work on the test in the next couple of days.

 "esp_ver": "0.9.9-49b152f-master",
  "sam_ver": "0.9.11-49b152f-master-sck23_air"
1 Like
#6

I am having trouble recreating this but am continuing to test and will report back. Any suggestions for more effective testing on my end? I am just turning wifi off for 5 minutes and back on.