Feeds stopped updating

Emoncms
1

Hello Team,
My local emoncms is again having trouble with updates, but this time it’s only with the data from IoTaWatt. Depending on the particular input from iotawatt, it stopped yesterday or about 10 days ago.

On the emonCMS Inputs page, it lists the IoTaWatt inputs as “inactive”. Nevertheless, the page is showing the values for each of the inputs changing. – On the Feeds page, the feeds derived from the IoTaWatt are listed as “inactive” (if I recall correctly) but the values on that page are updating regularly. – The graphs for those feeds show no recent data.

I noticed that the logs file partition was full. So I deleted the large emoncms.log.1 file which freed about 42% of that partition. I rebooted again. No improvement.

Note, the network that emonBase and IotaWatt are on was down for a day or two. I noticed the problem after restoring the network and accessing emonCMS.

I’m guessing it’s a red herring, but when I asked IoTaWatt to send the data again, the emoncms.log file grew with a lot of entries like this:

...
2018-11-30 22:31:46.756|WARN|PHPFina.php|post() timestamp older than feed start time id=71
2018-11-30 22:31:46.756|WARN|PHPFina.php|post() timestamp older than feed start time id=61
2018-11-30 22:31:46.757|WARN|PHPFina.php|post() timestamp older than feed start time id=60
2018-11-30 22:31:46.758|WARN|PHPFina.php|post() timestamp older than feed start time id=63
...

I did capture and Admin page log, but I can’t find it right now so I’ll have to reobtain it tomorrow and upload it here when I have a better internet connection.

What are my next debugging steps?

2

Does IotaWatt keep it’s own time? It looks like that must be set wrong as EmonCMS is complaining about the timestamp so the Inputs will update but not the Feed (though why the value should change if inactive is probably a bug).

Can you view the actual data sent (not sure if it is by MQTT or API)?

Set the log level to INFO in the emoncms settings (I’ll add that to first aid), that should tell you the actual data sent.

3

Looks like my service check list in the first aid post would not cover this issue. The symptoms suggest that the IotaWatt time is incorrect as @borpin suggests.

4

I don’t think that’s a red herring.

It’s highly unlikely that the IoTaWatt clock is off. It has a battery RTC that stays within about 1sec/day of UTC, which is set and regularly synched with the NTP time server pool.

There’s not enough here to diagnose, but the problem appears to be that IoTaWatt is attempting to upload data for the period when the WiFi was out, and emonCMS believes it has data that is more recent, so it won’t accept the historical data.

If you could post the IoTaWatt message log, all of the questions about time and timing should be answered, as well as exact information about the duration of the WiFi outage and whether there were any power failures during the wifi outage. I’m interested in that because IoTaWatt’s will recover with the correct time using the RTC, but maybe other components in the chain will need the wifi to get to the NTP server.

This would probably go faster and easier at the IoTaWatt forum.

EDIT: I just saw your old post about no verification email on the IoTaWatt forum. All I can say is that there are signups succeeding nearly every day and no other reports of problems. Maybe you could try using a different email address? I sub out the forum administration, as that’s not my expertise.

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