RAK4630 with meshtastic FW stops communicating after few minutes

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1

Hi all,

I want to build a LORA mesh in Germany for communication purpose. We are looking for a good technology for 2-3 router. The WisBlock with RAK4630 was recommended, I got two and started the power measurements. All looks good, the consumption seems to be below 5mA, much better than the T-Beam.

For setting the RAK4630 up I did the following steps: installed newest Meshtastic firmware (firmware-rak4631_5005-1.2.59.d81c1c0.uf2) by dropping it into the finder window of the device, pairing device to Android meshtastic app, changing name of device, setting the channel to that I used with my T-beams.

My problem is the following, when started the first time after these settings, the communication with another Android phone (connected to a t-beam) worked fine, all messages were received and I was able to send messages, all as expected. But after several minutes, the device is still visible and can be connected via BL, but no messages go through. I restarted device, no effect. I also newly installed the meshtastic firmware, no effect.

I read out the settings (which I haven’t changed) via CLI, maybe this might help you to see the problem:

Owner: Router_ba46 (Rtr)

Preferences: { “positionBroadcastSecs”: 240, “sendOwnerInterval”: 15, “phoneTimeoutSecs”: 900, “lsSecs”: 300, “region”: “EU865”, “locationShare”: “LocEnabled”, “gpsUpdateInterval”: 240, “positionFlags”: 35, “isAlwaysPowered”: true }

Does anyone know, what the cause of this problem might be? Hope it is only a bad setting, maybe go for sleep forever after 300 seconds, or something like this…

Best, Christian

2

I would reset to the default config, test with that and then change your settings one at a time and test again. Looking quickly at the settings the is_always_powered is not meant for nfr52.

3

Ok, but I haven’t changed any settings, only paired via BT, changed the name of device and changed the channel to the one I used successfully with the t-beams.

But I will give it a try. How can I reset the configuration?

4

do meshtastic --set factory_reset true

This is what a default config looks like

Preferences: { “phoneTimeoutSecs”: 900, “lsSecs”: 300, “region”: “US”, “positionFlags”: 35 }

5

I did the reset to factory settings, the new settings (obtained with meshtastic --info) are indeed:

Preferences: { “phoneTimeoutSecs”: 900, “lsSecs”: 300, “region”: “EU865”, “positionFlags”: 35 }

I did the reset for two devices, on RAK4630 and one T-beam and checked the communication between both devices by sending messages from one to the other devices every few minutes.

Sending and receiving the messages worked fine for 45 minutes, but without any changes from my side, after these 45 minutes the RAK4630 stopped receiving the messages from the T-beam, while the T-beam is still receiving the messages from the RAK4630. I turned off both devices, but same behavior after turning on again.

Thereafter, I did the following. I did the same reset for my second RAK4630 device (called B), and checked, if there is communication between these two RAK4630 (note, I changed nothing with the device A). Both devices can communicate, which seems to indicate, that the above communication problem after 45 minutes was caused by the t-beam device not the RAK4630 device A.

This second test with the two RAK4630 devices works well since nearly 3 hours, there was only one time that one RAK4630 was not reacting (maybe sleeping, only the LED next to the RESET button was constantly on, all others off). After turning off/on it was reacting again.

Does this problem sound anyhow familiar to you? What tests shall I do next, to get more details?

1 Like
6

The nrf52 does not sleep, so that is probably not what is happening. How much network traffic is there? Are you sending a lot of test messages?

7

I was sending short messages every 5-10 minutes, I had a pause of messages of 90 minutes just before 2pm. Right after this break, the one nrf52 didn’t react and only one LED was on, not flashing. I will keep the nrf52s on during night and will check if they talk with each other tomorrow morning.

8

Great, the reset actually worked and even after one night with no activity both nrf52 worked fine and communicated with each other. Thanks for this tipp.

One question, if I would use the nrf52 as router, is it necessary to set the same channel as the mobile t-beam devices (our individual channel), or can I keep the default channel settings?

Since it works fine at the moment I’m hesitating changing something.