Hi everyone! My lab and I are replacing our motus stations with raspberry pi 3 B+ sensorgnomes, and a majority of our towers are in remote locations. These towers are hooked up to batteries that are charged by solar panels. There have been previous occasions where we get to a tower for data collection in the winter and the battery is dead. I was wondering how to download data from a raspberry pi 3 B+ when there is no local wifi hotspot to connect to (whether due to lack of power or other reasons)? I’ve looked through the SD card after running tests for ~3 hours and ~12 hours with test tags and didn’t see any “SGdata” folders on the SD card, which is where data was stored on beaglebones. I was using the most recent Sensorgnome Software Release (as of 2024-06-06). So far, I’ve only downloaded data via the wifi hotspot. I apologize if this is an obvious or previously answered question, and I thank you for your help in advance.
Hi Lauren,
There are a few options…
- if the battery is dead you could temporarily power the Raspberry Pi from your laptop. Note that many laptop USB ports don’t provide sufficient power for a Pi, though on the 3B I have found this usually works.
- if you can power it this way you could connect with the WiFi hotspot
- OR using an ethernet cable
- If the SG Pi is powered down you can remove the SD card as you’ve been doing and download it that way. The data should be in an SGdata folder, but it will be in a different disk partition. So it will appear in your in your computer file explorer as if it’s a completely different drive. I find these often aren’t assigned a driver letter, though, and you need to go into “Create and Format Disk Partitions” (assuming you’re using Windows) to assign it a drive letter. After that it will show up in your file explorer.
But it’s odd that the WiFi network isn’t showing up at all. As you’re using the new software, you should see two flashing green LED lights indicating it’s running properly.
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