I have just updated to emonSD 26Oct17 having run the previous version from May2016 very happily. I used a new SD card for the recommissioning. The system appears to lose communications after a few hours although seems to be running OK locally. Equally I notice that with the new software the wi-fi percentage shows as 100% whereas previously it was solidly 76%.although the Emonpi is mounted exactly as before… When restarted the system shows the expected reading for both mains power and Solar Power. Am I unique or have others seen the same issue.
Hi Barry, did you find issue, seems to be the same problem I,m having, Only fix for me atm is a reboot via a connected screen and keyboard.
Unfortunately I have not found the issue. In my case a straight-forward reboot by doing a shutdown fixes the comms. without needing to connect a keyboard etc. I am still investigating. One real oddity I have noticed is that at times the wifi percentage even goes in the range of 110-140% for a few seconds.
Further investigation appears to have found the cure for my WiFi problem. It was a very very slight amount of corrosion on the circuit board of the emonpi where the external antenna is mounted. Cleaned that up and the wifi signal monitor is now solid at (in my case) 92%.
Do you mean where the antenna is mounted on the Pi 3 or are you refering to the external antenna connector on the emonpi board? The external antenna on the emonpi is for the 433MHz network not WiFi.
The WiFi antenna is in-built “on-board” on the Raspberry Pi 3 or if you are running an older Pi 2 based emonPi, the antenna is in-built in the USB dongle.
Yes I do mean the connector for the external antenna. I have blindly assumed that this was for a good wifi signal. I do have the older emonpi and it has got the external dongle. Thanks for educating me. Appreciated. I had spoken too early in retrospect as although the server had been stable for 24 hours or so since I “cleaned” it up it has had an outage.
I have a monitor program mounted on another computer in the local network which pings the emonpi every few seconds and reports any outage of more than a couple of seconds. This shows that my emonpi loses connectivity for a few minutes every now and then (many hours apart) but returns without any action by me. Connection is entirely by wifi but this is a good connection ( a solid 92% as mentioned earlier). Any thoughts on this issue would be appreciated. As mentioned in my first post this issue has only arisen since I set up the machine using the Oct17 SD image. It had been working for a couple of years with its original SD image.
[Discussion moved from the Feeds Stop, Have to Reboot EmonBase - #14 by marvinpandroid thread due to being WiFi related rather than an RFM network issue]
Hi, I,m in the same boat, EmonBase drops wifi randomly, few hour to overnight. The lights are all flashing normally and can communicate with keyboard and monitor plugged in but cannot connect over wifi. Power suplly is a quality 5.1v 2500ma one. Very frustrating., regards VB.
Hi, It appears the wireless network goes down. I can input commands etc with the keyboard and monitor directly connected. But I cannot ping it from another pc which was connected before, eg showing my solar app. I have turned power saving off, but this did not help. As I said all the leds seem to be flashing/on normally. The only way I can get it back is do a reboot.
Hi Guys, looks like the wifi dying is directly related to the power saving feature. How do I make
“Sudo iwconfig wlan0 power off” fire up when the EmonBase starts up, rather than having to put it in manually all the time?, Martin.
Well looks like I have 2 issues that effect the WiFi. 1st is having to put in the power off line on reboot (not sure where to get it running automatically). But the second issue is my tablet, seems Samsung tablets have an issue with killing the wifi on the Broadcom chip. Soon as I log into emonbase it dies. Mine is a brand new Tab A. It seems Cyprus/Broadcom are aware of it but no fix yet, (info on official Pi site). When I get my broadband connection running, hopefully end of this month I will try ethernet. Currently using a wifi dongle.
Ok, so far so good, I think the issues are fixed,
- wifi dying randomly, this appears to be a common issue (old) that is fixed by inserting the line
“wireless-power off” to /etc/network/interfaces file. - My Samsung tablet also killed the wifi requiring a reboot when I tried to log into my emonbase,
Seemingly it also effects Samsung phones to. The fix is to make sure you have the correct location in " /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf" example
country=AU
or wherever you are. This appears to have solved the issue.
Hope this is helpful to someone.
Well looks like the Samsung still crashes the emonbase wifi, what would be the best option, a wifi dongle in a usb port or use ethernet?
Despite having amended my wi-fi config to cover wireless-power off I still get random outages of the wifi which returns without any effort on my part after a few minutes.
As explained earlier I ping the pi every minute via a monitor program on a windows PC. The interesting point is that I notice the outage lasts on almost all occasions for around 13-15 minutes before the system reverts to be available for connection by wifi and typically I get two or three outages per day
Any ideas of what to do or look would be much appreciated. I have looked at the various logs in /var/log and can see no evidence of anything untoward happening at the time of the outages.