A little gem - The Yaorea YRG01 Pt.2 - Modding for Radmon.org

I couldn't wait to tinker with this so I decided to mod this in lieu of getting the ESP-12 modules and programmer. Using a scope I found the connection points I needed, Soldered some wires on. Soldered a Wemos D1 Mini clone on the other end, installed ESPGeiger 0.7.0, and boom! Literally as simple as that. Using the scope I checked the ribbon cable pins one by one and found the pulse coming from the PSU board. I didn't want to solder right on the ribbon, it looks janky already, so probed about and found that it is connected to L12. The MCU side of the inductor is where I soldered the pulse wire to - marked in yellow in the picture. Then I found the +3.3v supply to the BLE IC and verified it turns on and off with the BLE, and found a ground next to it. They are the power for the ESP8266, and when BLE is on, so is the ESP8266, and off when the BLE is off. I left the BLE working in case it comes in useful in the future. Then secured the wires with a bit of hot glue and put the case back together. And now it works well with ESPGeiger. 😊

The pulse is nice and clean, but a little long at ~230uS. This should give a theoretical max of ~4348 cps / ~260,870 cpm, so will be fine

A little hot glue to secure the wires.

And the wires tucked in neatly at the bottom.

I've configured it and is now uploading to Radmon: https://radmon.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=30&station=zzzzz_simomax_test 😊 It appears to be working well. It will run from the battery too, so I guess if a mobile phone ran a hot spot, it could be a completely mobile unit. No GPS though, but that could be added! 😄

Update.....

Again, I couldn't leave it alone. I wasn't happy seeing the wires coming out of it's side, so I had a go at desoldering the ESP-12 module off of the Wemos board and succeeded without destroying it!

I then connected the there wires and powered on. The ESP was dead. Looking ta the circuit diagram there are some pull-up and pull-down resistors. Researching this I found that EN has to be high and GPIO15 has to be pulled down to ground to enable boot from flash. I added a couple of resistors for this and it booted fine.

So I tucked it in and closed up the case. Job done, and by looking you can't tell.

It works alongside the BLE, so if I want the ESP off I turn BLE off, and vice versa. I'm quite pleased with the end result. 😊

I also worked out that the conversion factor programmed into the YGR01 is 151, or 0.0066225.

Update 2.....

I have tested the power consumption of this counter in pretty much all configurations. There is a little bit of ambiguity between having a battery fitted and full charged and not having one fitted. I think this is due to some current draw from the battery as well as the 5v input, and why it occasionally tops up the battery. Also enabling clicks appears to add more current draw in certain configurations than others. I did not test any consumption with the disco LEDs on. Here are the results:

LPM = Low Power Mode
RPM = Regular Power Mode
BLE = Bluetooth Low Energy
ESP = ESP8266

During LPM the BLE and ESP are always off. When running on 5v USB with a full battery, it will occasionally draw up to an additional 22mA to top up the battery. The BLE when enabled adds another 4~5mA across all configurations, and the ESP adds another ~95mA across all configurations.

5v USB input - No battery fitted
LPM ~10mA / ~10mA (with clicks enabled)
RPM ~55mA / ~60mA (with clicks enabled)

5v - full battery
LPM ~4mA / ~4mA (with clicks enabled)
RPM ~60mA / ~78mA (with clicks enabled)

5v - empty battery
LPM ~450mA / ~452mA (with clicks enabled)
RPM ~478mA / ~480mA (with clicks enabled)

Battery Only 4.2v Full
LPM ~6mA / ~9mA (with clicks enabled)
RPM ~57mA / ~77mA (with clicks enabled)

Running on a full (4.2v) battery, with everything enabled it is going to draw ~177mA, so for uploading to radmon.org, or MQTT or something else it would be prudent to run this on a 5v supply permanently. Keeping the battery in place offers a nice ~14 hours of backup runtime. Turning everything off and letting it drop into LPM consumes around 6mA, so should theoretically run for around 18 days on a full charge and whilst won't be uploading to the internet, it will be logging the counts and storing them on the device itself.

Archived from radmon.org - originally posted 18/04/2025