I know nothing about the ESP, sorry, so I can’t guess what’s happening. But the emonTx on its own has proven very reliable, it’s people who have connected a non-shop ESP to it that has caused problems because the ESP sent data that it should not have done, which was interpreted as configuration instructions and, whilst it continued to run, setting the calibration to zero meant the emonTx showed zero voltage and hence zero power.
The way to test will be to hook it up via the UART to a PC or if you have a spare Pi (any flavour), connect that via the UART.
An update to this ageing thread. The issue continued exactly as before, often freezing and needing to be restarted. In fact, I added a smartplug to the 5v supply so I can remote power cycle it, because the issue happened so often.
This did not used to happen and so we all looked at issue around the age of the EmonTx board etc, but it also did not used to have four CTs plugged in so I am thinking more about that now. Could a timing issue in an older EmonTx firmware cause it to freeze?
Since getting a UART adapter, I have updated both the EmonTx and EmonESP firmware to versions 3.3.0 and 3.0.0 respectively. The continuous monitoring version of the EmonTx firmware did not seem to be compatible with EmonESP, unless I’m missing something.
In the past week, this has been stable. I will report back further after a longer test period.
Where does it say that?
That’s a good question, it doesn’t as far as I can see. And since the continuous monitoring version is now the standard version I naturally started there. But the data pairs shown in the ESP webpage were along the lines of…
AC Power OK : NaN
…rather than the expected…
CT1 : 1234
CT2 : 5678
etc.
So it seemed kind of like the firmwares were both working but not understanding each other. So I switched the TX to discreet sampling and it worked straight away.
It certainly occurred to me that some people must be using CM with an ESP but it didn’t work for me and since I’ve only used DS in the past, I don’t know what I’m missing. If this config is stable then I’m happy.
I don’t have an ESP8266, I’ve never tracked down any meaningful documentation for it, so I really can’t help you.
Did you change the output format of the CM sketch to suit the ESP8266? I can’t see AC Power OK in the copy of the source code that I’m looking at. What there is is a one-off message at start-up: “AC present” or “AC missing”, then unless you have turned on the serial output (for sketches downloaded before 18th of this month) you see nothing. If the serial output is on - as it is for downloads since then, it sends “MSG:nnn,Vrms:vvv,P1:pppp,P2:pppp…” etc. And that is what you will see when you connect a programmer. How this is presented in the ESP8266 I have no idea.
I think it’s about time I returned to and closed off this thread in case it helps anyone.
TL:DR Update your firmware
My EmonTX and EmonESP have worked together flawlessly in the two months since I updated their firmwares per the post above, which I will mark as a solution.
We’ll not be able to say which device was causing the issue given I updated both but since the problem seems resolved it really doesn’t matter.
My inability to to get the continuous monitoring version to work was likely because I had not enabled serial output, as @Robert.Wall says. This was because I really wanted to install specific precompiled versions. Since serial output is now enabled by default, I would advise others to go with this rather than the older discrete monitoring version like me.
Thanks for all of your work and support.
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