1

I'm now designing a weather meter to measure the weather in my area. The control board of the meter I'm designing will take the data from the probe and send back to the main station through a FM transceiver. Since the task is pretty simple so I want to use the ATtiny13 microcontroller to handle it because the size of the controller is small and its simplicity. But I worry about its reliability since I want the device to run at least 10-20 year only 1-2 downtime per year at worst.

So I want to ask if the ATtiny13 is reliable for long term project like this. The weather is not really extreme, the temperature is around 0 to 50°C and it will be encased in epoxy so humidity is not a problem.

Edit: the ATtiny13 is only to regulate the board like when to send data back or execute the command it received. All the probe and the FM transceiver (not transmitter, sorry) is sperate device, not a part of the control board.

winny
  • 14,707
  • 6
  • 46
  • 66
Sairext Irkaris
  • 165
  • 7
  • 2
    Changed your link to Google to the actual link to the manufacturer's product page! – Marcus Müller Mar 21 '23 at 16:20
  • 2
    The biggest concern isn't the reliability of the microcontroller, but the reliability of your firmware. – Jonathan S. Mar 21 '23 at 16:20
  • 1
    And of the analog components outside your microcontroller. – Marcus Müller Mar 21 '23 at 16:21
  • By the way, your weather data is probably more or less digital - what does the analog FM modulation have to do with this? Do you want to implement an FSK transmitter, maybe? In that case, not using an external FM modulator is probably good for reliability – there's integrated digital FSK transmitters, and these will be more long-term stable than an external analog modulator. – Marcus Müller Mar 21 '23 at 16:24
  • 1
    No more or less than any other Atmel. It's made on the same process after all. – DKNguyen Mar 21 '23 at 16:35
  • @MarcusMüller, those probes and the FM transceiver is all digital so there's no analog components – Sairext Irkaris Mar 21 '23 at 16:49
  • 1
    again, FM is an analog modulation; could you specific about what it does to transport digital data? That's not obvious to me (and I'm a comms engineer…). – Marcus Müller Mar 21 '23 at 16:50
  • @JonathanS. the firmware is not thing special, the ATtiny13 is more like a look up table than a processor since its funtion is read input and execute base on what it read – Sairext Irkaris Mar 21 '23 at 16:51
  • Unless you are constantly writing to internal memory which has an endurance rating, I would suspect something else on your board will be the first culprit before the ATtiny. – winny Mar 21 '23 at 16:52
  • @MarcusMüller I choose it because it have a long range and the data only consist of 12kB per hour so it doesn't matter much – Sairext Irkaris Mar 21 '23 at 16:54
  • @winny in my case, the ATtiny13 acts more like a look up table and I won't ever update the program unless there's a bug so I don't think write time is not a problem – Sairext Irkaris Mar 21 '23 at 16:57
  • Should be no internal issues then. Thermal cycling over 30 years should be considered too. – winny Mar 21 '23 at 16:58
  • @winny thanks, so I guest I'll use it then – Sairext Irkaris Mar 21 '23 at 16:59
  • @SairextIrkaris as said, I think going for a microcontroller with integrated RF frontend will reduce potentrial sources of error and component aging, which is good for reliabilty. "long range" is a function of the quality of your communication partner, not of FM as is. Again, it's not clear at all how you do digital data over FM, which is still an analog mode. – Marcus Müller Mar 21 '23 at 17:12
  • @MarcusMüller I don't really have the idea about how the FM transmitter work, the people send it to me doesn't tell me much about it, only how to control it, since they said that it could work up to 25 years without problen so I don't think I need to care about it much, the data I give it is digital though a I2C connection and the receiver also give me the digital data and since it's not a part of the board so on't think it would affect anyhing – Sairext Irkaris Mar 21 '23 at 17:27
  • @SairextIrkaris ah, that's an important piece of information. – Marcus Müller Mar 21 '23 at 17:55

1 Answers1

0

After some discussion in the comment section of the question, I think the ATtiny13 is reliable enough for this purpose.

  • The task is not too demanding, not much imformation to be processed
  • Most of the signals are digital and there are not many signals to read
  • The write time is low since the controller only has around 10,000 for flash and 100,000 for EEPROM.

So if the task is similar to this then I would say that the ATtiny13 good enough.

ocrdu
  • 9,195
  • 22
  • 32
  • 42
Sairext Irkaris
  • 165
  • 7