weather station problems

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ed
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#1 weather station problems

Post by ed »

Funny thing happened on the way to the forum today....no but seriously...

Please ignore if you're not bothered about IT shenanigins.

I've been making some changes to the weather report page on my web site and put together a test station to
populate the test database on the pi server. http://www.vitalstates.org/weather/weather.php


I've had a number of different receivers running on a mixture of ESP and arduino/Atmel processors and have been experiencing
horrid reception on all platforms. There are frequent packets with garbage and only about 5% of packets satisfy the CRC. The software has always been my standard code that runs successfully on all the remote stations, and the hardware is the same to all intents and purposes. The distance from transmitter is approx 40 mtrs, well within range.

I've been chasing this problem since well before Christmas, resorting to ordering new receiver chips and a new ESP32, thinking I've got some very noisy hardware.

Today I may have had a breakthrough. On my thrid receiver(RXB12), and probably my 12th permutation of hardware I suddenly got valid packets consistently with very few rejects.

I then turned on the ceramic heater in the workroom because it was getting chilly, and waddyaknow...a string of consistently invalid packets.
I turned off the heater and the packets started passing CRC and the invalid garbage disappeared.

It's early days, but I strongly suspect that my heater chucks out some RF in the region of 433mhz, although it's sited about 3 mtrs from the receiver rig.....

I should have been looking in this area a lot sooner..Oh waily waily.
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#2 Re: weather station problems

Post by ed »

I may have gone off a bit prematurely here......
simple program with only radio receiver(RXB12) and packet decoding works fine today with fan heater on...mmmm

extended that program to include I2C test and it still works fine with fan on....mmm
loaded the original full code(receiver, I2C, wifi and upload) and it fails, hardly any valid packets getting through...this is the original code running on 3 installations perfectly, although one of those installations uses GPRS modem instead of wifi.

there's something more sinister afoot here....the only difference between this test installation and the other wifi installations is that this(test) has a 38 pin esp32 and the others have a 30 pin esp32.... I'm waiting for another 30 pin cpu to be delivered....

I will now extend the code with the receiver and I2C to include wifi code and see if that's the problem on the 38 pin chip.....
I should mention that all the peripherals, the receiver and the I2C peripherals all test ok in isolation with this cpu.

oh waily waily

I'm looking forward to doing some hifi stuff soon....
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#3 Re: weather station problems

Post by ed »

the test code with the wifi initialised and connected to the network fails 99% of time. This is without any traffic. I will now run the test with the receiver some distance from the cpu, which to my mind will be proof enough if it works. The datasheet for these receivers is sadly lacking in this area.

definitely evidence of my deteriating grip on things....very slow to creep up on this and all I wanted to do in the first place was put some data in a test database so I could update the web display....I could just have put some data in manually and been oblivious to this bag of worms. I suppose the experience may be of some use in a future existence.
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#4 Re: weather station problems

Post by ed »

some progress in my pursuit of independence from weather underground...

this will not work on mobile phones(yet) but if anybody can be bothered to have a look on a normal device(desktop, laptop, tablet) then I'd be grateful for any feedback if it doesn't work:

http://www.vitalstates.org/weather/weather.php
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#5 Re: weather station problems

Post by pre65 »

I looked at todays data and everything looked fine.

Laptop W10.

Just out of interest, why do you need such detail ?
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

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#6 Re: weather station problems

Post by ed »

some users may require that much as a minimum...
the malor piece of missing info is elevation.
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#7 Re: weather station problems

Post by Nick »

pre65 wrote: Sun Jan 23, 2022 1:23 pm I looked at todays data and everything looked fine.

Laptop W10.

Just out of interest, why do you need such detail ?
Where do you think "today's data" comes from?
Whenever an honest man discovers that he's mistaken, he will either cease to be mistaken or he will cease to be honest.
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#8 Re: weather station problems

Post by pre65 »

Nick wrote: Sun Jan 23, 2022 1:37 pm
pre65 wrote: Sun Jan 23, 2022 1:23 pm I looked at todays data and everything looked fine.

Laptop W10.

Just out of interest, why do you need such detail ?
Where do you think "today's data" comes from?
Ed's back garden ?
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#9 Re: weather station problems

Post by Mike H »

Link works here. :thumbleft:
 
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