When I opened (what thought was a well sealed, weather tight case) I was greeted with a red-brown slosh of water. And not just a little! I'm not sure how the water got in. It's possible some was due to condensation (it's been VERY humid here and recently turned cool and dryer), but it seems there was too much water for that alone. While the node was still happily working, there was some obvious problems. The battery had rust on the ends, a couple of rows of pixels in the OLED were dead and there was mounds of bright blue copper corrosion along several solder pads.
I dumped out the water and dried everything out. I cleaned the board and the battery and everything still seemed to work. I updated the firmware and screwed the lid back down and reattached everything to the roof and it worked another two weeks.
Unfortunately, a few days ago, it started acting strange. The signal report went to nearly nothing. So, back to to the roof. This time, everything was still dry, but there was evidence of a bird having visited my node and the antenna was askew. So, I replace the whole node with a newer one and brought the first node back to the shack to see what's going on.
While the old nose was T-Beam S3Core Supreme, the new node is a RAK4361. So far, my experience has been very positive with the RAK units (this is my second). They are extremely energy efficient and seem rock solid. I wrapped this one in rubber shrink tubing to help protect it. We'll give it a couple of weeks and see how it does.
