emonTx powered down?

Hardware
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1

Hi Team,
I started using emonTx again two months ago. Since then, one of my emonTx’s seems to keep shutting itself down. To be clear, what I see is… I boot it up. At first all is good, but if I check emoncms a few days later, I see it hasn’t responded in a few hours or days. When I eye-ball the emonTx, I don’t see any flashing lights, whereas the working emonTx next to it does have a flashing light. Pulling the power connector off and replacing it does successfully restart that emonTx, but a few days later, the process repeats.

Is there any sort of forensics or diagnostics that I can do? I’m about to change the power supply. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

2

What sort of power supply are you using, 5 V d.c. USB, or the a.c. adapter? If the latter, what is the value of your mains voltage, as it is being reported?

3

Thanks @Robert.Wall. It’s the latter which I ordered from the open energy monitor store several years ago. It’s reporting 121.5 vrms. I’ve not been monitoring that input, but I’ll now start logging that.

4

It looks as if my first theory has bitten the dust, then. If the a.c. voltage is exceptionally low, then it’s possible that the a.c. adapter won’t supply enough power to support the radio transmission, and the emonTx will crash. Normally, it will reset rather than locking up, but that was a possibility.

Have you seen this? EmonTX v3 taking a walk - #12 by Robert.Wall
There was no clear resolution to that thread, but it could help as a list of things to check. Obviously as you know it is stopping, any log immediately before it fails could be helpful.

5

FWIW… Previously this problem seemed to occur every 1-3 days, but I’ve not seen this problem for 10 days now. The last changes I’ve made are…

  1. The problem emonTx is next to another problem-free emonTx, so I swapped the power supplies.
  2. Over the past 10 days, I’ve been experiencing the emonhub crashes described in another thread after updating software there. Perhaps the emonpi software update or the crashes have had an indirect impact on the emonTx.

Prior changes that didn’t seem to help were:

  1. swapping the power supply for a totally new power supply from the oem shop.
  2. plugging the power supply in to a different outlet on the power strip. (Note: the other emonTx on the same power strip has had no problems.)

I’ve now just updated the emonpi software again hopefully fixing the emonhub logging crashes. I’ll post back here as I learn more.

6

I don’t believe that. Unless they are connected with a serial cable, the radio is path is very definitely only one way.