With the GSM and arduino powered on the whole time it lasts for about 30 hours without any direct sun light. When I check the led battery level it still shows it half full so I'm not sure why it turns off but I think I'd strip most of the electronics out of it if I were to use it anyway.
Was the 5V boost converter enough to run the GSM module? I know it can run through the arduino with USB power most of the time but it says it needs 6-12V.
Like I said before in this thread, I'm not running a real Arduino board as it was waisting a lot of power.
Instead I'm using an atmega chip. See post 11 on this thread.
Both my arduino and the gsm SIM800L are being powered directly from the battery, starting at 4,2v and ending wheh it fails (never checked the voltages).
I'm only powering the sensors through the boost converter because some of them were being unreliable.
Please note that all stuff on these project was the cheapest one I could get from eBay and maybe that's the reason I need a boost converter.
The batteries I'm using at the moment are 4 Samsung 18650 in parallel to extend capacity and it lasts for at least a month (over night no messages are sent now).
My connections are like this:
The battery powers the arduino and the relay;
The Arduino wakes up every hour and measures light;
If it's day, the arduino turns on the relay;
The relay then feeds the gsm and the boost converter;
The boost converter feeds the sensors;
The arduino reads the sensors after (0,5 seconds);
The arduino sends an sms with the data (after 30 seconds to allow the gsm to register on the network);
The arduino turns off the relay;
The arduino goes back to sleep for 1 hour.
Hope this helps
EDIT:
I've just checked the link for your solar panel and for that price it's not for sure 30000mAh. And having a solar panel only makes me believe that the real capacity should be far less than 30000mAh.
I have a Xiaomi Powerbank with real 16000mAh capacity and it would run an arduino and gsm for over 30 hours in 1 charge.
I believe this is not helping you and I'm not sure if the solar panel can get any effective charge into the batteries.
I had a similar one that would waist all the solar power on the blinking leds and I never got it to fully charge the batteries with direct sunlight for weeks...
Thanks dreasi0n, you've been more than helpful! I also planned on sleeping my arduino at night time. I had thought about using an external clock for it, but the light sensor is just as good. My next step will be to trial my device running off 2 - 4 18650 batteries and then size the solar panel to charge these. It's all baby steps at this point! I go 3 steps forward and 2 steps back. The sim800 module only works part of the time. I'll have to figure out if that's power or signal related. I hope it's not signal related because I plan on putting this somewhere a little more remote than where I am now