Ethernet Gateway problem
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Been running fine now for the past 17 hours in the latest test. Have my fingers crossed but have been fooled before in thinking it was fixed. Time will tell.
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Going on 24 hours of continuous operation (with fingers still crossed). Operating with soft SPI and separate radio power source (the 2 biggest issues in my opinion).
Been investigating rf24 libraries and see that libraries are set up so that radio will stop if an error is detected in radio operation. Can then only be started be initiating the radio begin function. Since this is only in Ethernet startup code, explains why I need to unplug the gateway to get it going when it fails.
There is a debug option in RF24 to allow user action in event of failure. Would help if this could be used to provide notice of failure since this seems to be a common problem. Maybe even allow for restart of the radio with count of failures so that everything does not come to a complete stop and never to start again till you unplug the gateway and restart.
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@Dan-S. said:
There is a debug option in RF24 to allow user action in event of failure. Would help if this could be used to provide notice of failure since this seems to be a common problem. Maybe even allow for restart of the radio with count of failures so that everything does not come to a complete stop and never to start again till you unplug the gateway and restart.
Yes, i've also noticed the FAILURE_HANDLING option-define in the latest RF24 releases. Would be good if we could make use of it.
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Going on 27 hours of continuous operation of the ethernet gateway. Close to declaring success, but having been bitten before....
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After over 2 days of continuous operation without a hitch, I believe all my gateway problems (all of which related to the radio) are solved. If I had known early on that the radio libraries are set up to stop if an error is detected in radio operation, I would have focused on it from the start.
In the interest of others having similar problems, the successful UNO/Ethernet shield gateway includes:
Soft SPI--enabled using the latest iteration of the mysensor library and Ethernet gateway software which includes the proper RF24 componenets and DigitalIO library required for its implementation. See anticimex's instructions above on how to implement. Think this was the biggest factor in stability.
Separate 5 volt power supply fed through the AMS1117 to provide 3.3v power to the radio (with common ground to UNO/shield). The onboard 3.3V feed cannot be depended upon to provide enough peak current to power the radio.
Also downloaded and used latest Arduino IDE 1.5.8
Finally I can move on to sensor building! Thanks for all the help provided by this forum.
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Great news Dan! I hope it holds up. I have not noticed any hiccups in my gw, but it is Nano-based and hence uses a different ethernet module (but with my software spi_en fix). But I also run the radio off its "own" regulator. I have posted a topic under "your project" with my build (still ongoing).
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Good to hear Dan...
Hope it keeps going on, as last hope you can add a watchdog to your gateway.
Good Luck
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Thank you all--still going strong without any hiccups.
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Gday everyone - i was just looking up something else to do with the etherten board and read this snippet below...it may help apply to somone who reads this thread in future....
We probablky dont have this issue anyway as we startup radios too.... but anyway... it may help someone..
http://www.freetronics.com/pages/usb-power-and-reset#.VGSniPmUceA<quote>
"Ethernet Reset IC Delay
If your W5100 Ethernet IC is not 'awake' after your board is powered up or reset, the most likely issue is that your Arduino microcontroller has come out of reset sooner than the W5100 IC, and the sketch has sent the W5100's ethernet configuration out before the W5100 140-280ms reset period has expired.
This is because the Arduino microcontroller has a 65 millisecond powerup/reset delay, the longest available to be set by the fuses and bootloader, and the STM811 Reset IC controlling the W5100 Ethernet IC has a longer reset delay of 140-280 milliseconds.The fix:
Insert this line as the very first line in the void setup() { function in your project:
delay( 50 ); // allow some time (50 ms) after powerup and sketch start, for the Wiznet W5100 Reset IC to release and come out of reset.50 ms covered all boards in our testing, though if in doubt make it 200-250 ms for full reliability. Adding this to the start of setup() does not affect any normal operations or running, it just adds a fraction of a second to the one-off powerup or reset of the board.
</quote>
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Hello,
I had the same problems and I solved it by using an external 12V power supply created with a RAC02-12SC from RECOM Powersupply.
Regards
