Arduino ProMini 3.3V on 1MHz + RFM69W missing ACKs

[electrik]

The long sleeps in between your send functions are not really needed, if you would like some time to charge the capacitor (this is done in milliseconds), a delay will also do.
But that doesn't explain the duplicate messages. Can you post debug log for both situations? If you suspect the drivers, it could be better to open an issue on GitHub

[thenounoursk]

I'll post logs this weekend hopefully.

I take your point on charging the capacitor. It looks like 1ms would be more than enough to charge it completely. I suppose the question is also, how much time does it take for the battery to recover from a send operation? I don't have the right tooling to do a nice numerical analysis on that, but maybe can do something cheeky.

[rozpruwacz]

@thenounoursk I really advise You to get a good multimeter with current measurement down to 1uA. Without it You will have hard time to debug problems with high currrent consumption. And I mean high current is about 100uA for a battery powered node. Waiting couple of days to check if current cosumption problem is fixed is not a good idea :) There can be a lot of issues that makes your node consume to much current, both hardware and software. For example, I have a node that had good current consumption, but after some time it started to cosume much more current. It turned out to be a failed power decoupling capacitor. Without multimeter I would never find out what was the cause.

[thenounoursk]

@rozpruwacz I should have been more precise, I have a good multimeter already :) But when I talked about how measuring how much time it takes the battery to recover after a send operation, I thought about doing it on an oscilloscope... Poor phrasing on my part, my multimeter will be enough to get an idea of how much time it takes, I will just not get the nice chart to back up my experience.

[iahim67]

Hi, as a side note - check the datasheet of the 100uf capacitor you have used for the leakage current as it could be as high a few uA which is comparable with the current of a sleeping ATMega328 / Arduino board. Make sure you use a low leakage capacitor for a longer battery life.
For a low current temperature sensor you can use a thermistor (like 4k7 @ 25 Celsius) in series with a resistor (4k7 1%). Connect one end of the th to the GND, one end of the resistor to a digital output of the Arduino and the common connection of the th and resistor to an analog input of Arduino. You will power on (make the output HIGH) the th+resistor string from the digital out shortly before making the measurement then make the output LOW after the measurement.
Means you will only use power to measure the temperature for a very short time.
Here is my code (I am not a professional firmware guy :smiley: ) for such a temperature sensor:

// ver. v1.2
/*
  Mini v5
  TH: Th=GND, Series Resistor=3, Middle=A0
  check Radio connections/wires
  check power supply +5V
*/

//Enable debug prints to serial monitor
//#define MY_DEBUG

#define MY_RADIO_NRF24
#define MY_NODE_ID 9
#define DEBUG 0
#define BATTERY_SENSOR 1

#include <MySensors.h>
#include <Vcc.h>

#define TH_LIBRARY_CHILD_ID 1
#define VOLTAGE_CHILD_ID 2
#define TH_PIN 3

int _nominal_resistor = 4700;
int _nominal_temperature = 25;
int _b_coefficient = 3950;
int _series_resistor = 4877;
int _pin = 0;
int batt_report_count = 120;

const float VccMin        = 1.8;
const float VccMax        = 3.0;
const float VccCorrection = 1.0 / 1.0; // Measured Vcc by multimeter divided by reported Vcc

Vcc vcc(VccCorrection);

MyMessage msgTemp(TH_LIBRARY_CHILD_ID, V_TEMP);
MyMessage msgVoltage(VOLTAGE_CHILD_ID, V_VOLTAGE);

void setup()
{
  //Serial.begin(115200);
}

void presentation()
{
  // Send the sketch version information to the gateway and Controller
  sendSketchInfo("TH_LIBRARY@Mini_2xR6", "1.2_FOTA");
  wait(1);
  present(TH_LIBRARY_CHILD_ID, S_TEMP, "TH_LIBRARY");
  wait(1);
  present(VOLTAGE_CHILD_ID, S_MULTIMETER, "TH_LIBRARY_BATT");
  wait(1);
}

void loop()
{
  if (batt_report_count == 120)
  {
    batteryReport();
  }
  batt_report_count--;
  if (batt_report_count == 0)
  {
    batt_report_count = 120;
  }
  tempReport();
  smartSleep(180000);
}

//###############################################################

// Send a battery level report to the controller
void batteryReport() {
  // measure the board vcc
  float v = vcc.Read_Volts();
  float p = vcc.Read_Perc(VccMin, VccMax);
#if DEBUG
  Serial.print("VCC = ");
  Serial.print(v);
  Serial.println(" Volts");
  Serial.print("VCC = ");
  Serial.print(p);
  Serial.println(" %");
#endif
#if BATTERY_SENSOR
  // report battery voltage
  send(msgVoltage.set(v, 3));
  wait(1);
#endif
  // report battery level percentage
  sendBatteryLevel(p);
  wait(1);
}

//##################################################################

void tempReport()
{
  // set TH pin in output mode
  pinMode(TH_PIN, OUTPUT);
  // set TH_PIN HIGH
  digitalWrite(TH_PIN, HIGH);
  wait(1);
  // read the voltage across the thermistor
  float adc = analogRead(_pin);
  // set TH_PIN LOW
  digitalWrite(TH_PIN, LOW);
  // calculate the temperature
  float reading = (1023 / adc)  - 1;
  reading = _series_resistor / reading;
  float temperature;
  temperature = reading / _nominal_resistor;     // (R/Ro)
  temperature = log(temperature);                  // ln(R/Ro)
  temperature /= _b_coefficient;                   // 1/B * ln(R/Ro)
  temperature += 1.0 / (_nominal_temperature + 273.15); // + (1/To)
  temperature = 1.0 / temperature;                 // Invert
  temperature -= 273.15;                         // convert to C
#if DEBUG == 1
  Serial.print(F("THER I="));
  Serial.print(TH1_CHILD_ID);
  Serial.print(F(" V="));
  Serial.print(adc);
  Serial.print(F(" T="));
  Serial.println(temperature);
#endif
  send(msgTemp.set(temperature, 1));
  wait(1);
}

[electrik]

@thenounoursk did you ever solve the issue of the duplicate messages on 1mhz?

[thenounoursk]

@electrik no not yet. It's still on my list of things to do though.

[electrik]

In the mean time I got it working. I thought I was using the HW model, but it turned out that it was a regular W model. Also I'm using the new driver, and this works perfectly.
Sometimes I do receive duplicate messages but I believe that is caused by the connection itself i.e. no acknowledge is received by the transmitter, and that resends the message.

[thenounoursk]

Thanks for the tip, I should give a try with the new driver then.

My node actually died a week ago, battery dead. Thing is, a week before that, I checked the battery with a multimeter and it looked in real good shape. So I'm not sure what happened but I'm leaning towards something unexpected rather normal life cycle of a battery. Out of interest, what's your typical lifetime (assuming your setup is similar)?

[electrik]

I can't tell yet. The node I'm now using is a wall switch, operating on a CR2032 battery. No idea yet how long it lasts.