Several people have asked me if they can run ANAVI Thermometer on batteries. Although, ANAVI Thermometer has been designed for indoor usage with continuous power supply, you can actually run it on batteries too.

The operating voltage of ANAVI Thermometer is 5 V and it is powered from a micro-USB connector. This means that any power supply for a modern phone with USB to micro-USB cable is suitable to power the board. Furthermore, this allows running ANAVI Thermometer on batteries from a power bank.

Due to the huge popularity of smartphones, nowadays power banks with USB ports are a commodity. I have published a video in my YouTube channel to demonstrate how ANAVI Thermometer with attached waterproof sensor and a mini OLED display is running from USB power bank. I am using a nice little USB gadget with a couple of 7-segment red displays to monitor the voltage and the current. The display on the top shows the voltage, and the other one shows the current.

For the test shown in the video, ANAVI Thermometer is running with the default firmware built from an Arduino sketch which is available at GitHub. As you can see the power consumption is less that a 100 mA (0.1A). Quick estimate calculations show that even with the default firmware ANAVI Thermometer should be able to run for more than three days powered by 10,0000 mAh power bank. For those of you interested in running ANAVI Thermometer longer on batteries, remove the peripherals because the additional sensors and the OLED display are consuming power. If needed, there is room for huge power saving by optimizing the open source default firmware.

Thank you very much for supporting this crowdfunding campaign. So far the manufacturing of ANAVI Thermometer is going according to the plan. The acrylic enclosures are ready. As you know the crowdfunding campaign was so successful that it hit all stretch goals. Apart from the cool stickers that all backers will receive, I am also working on more videos, updates and tutorials like this one.

Special thanks to Karl Schuh for his continuous efforts for translating the user’s manual to German. I have been contributing to open source projects for almost a decade and I am still amazed to see how every day open source projects bring together people from different counties, time zones and even continents. This is fantastic! Thank you!

Best regards,
Leon