I have been playing with Meshtastic on 2 Raspberry Pi Picos with Waveshare LoRa modules. I have one hooked up to my phone using the Android client. The other is hooked up to a Raspberry Pi using the web client. I can send messages between them and have done some preliminary range testing.
But I keep running into the situation where one or both of the radios frequently just seem to stop working. I have no idea where and how to troubleshoot. It seems it could be a hardware OR software issue.
I tried timing how long it seemed to take to stop working to see if it was consistent, but it doesn’t seem to be. But if I restart the clients or power cycle the radios, or a combination of the two, they will start working again for a limited time (10 to 30 minutes).
What do I check? Is anyone else using pico/waveshare combo and seeing something similar (or any other hardware for that matter)? Any settings I should be checking?
I’m using 2.2.13.f570204 from when it was the alpha version, i see now it is the stable version.
I have the serial module turned on on one of them using pins 8 & 9, but have not actually done anything with that after i realized it was working without having anything hooked to those pins. I should have thought to try turning that module back off. I will do that now.
No other changes from the stock firmware.
One other thing i notice, the time reported on incoming messages in the web client, and when displaying “meshtastic --nodes” is off. It looks like its interpreting it as unix time zero, so clearly something isn’t passing the time, but 0. Is that possibly a source of the problem?
Is there a way to manually set the time, something like meshtastic --set-time xx:xx:xx? I looked but didnt see any references in the help to time-related functions.
I figured that’s what was happening with the time, nice to get confirmation.
I turned off the serial module on the one and tried it out. It was still doing the same thing. I do notice on the Android app that it tells me in the notifications how many nodes are connected and its obvious one or both dropped out. Then i restart the client(s) and things generally start to work again. But sometimes it appears both nodes are connected, and it still doesn’t seem to want to send.
I did some research and saw mentions of an “always powered on” setting, but that appears to have been on version 1.2 and doesn’t seem to be available in the new version. Is there a setting like that that i am missing?
I’m at a loss. I’m loving Meshtastic so far, other than this, maybe it’s time to buy more mainstream hardware and relegate these to the original task i bought them for, monitoring some beehives. But if i could use Meshtastic’s Telemetry module to accomplish this, i would…
Hmm, I’ve not seen the freezing behavior with recent firmware. Do you have the battery connected to the hat? I’ve seen before that it would power off when transmitting if it wasn’t connected.
Otherwise, you could try to capture the logs (with meshtastic --noproto) when it happens, that might give a clue what is going on.
As Garth mentioned, without GPS or RTC the Pico doesn’t have time. When you use any command with the CLI (e.g. meshtastic --info), it will update its time, but it will lose it once it reboots.
I don’t have one of the batteries plugged in, i will give that a try.
I’ll try the meshtastic --noproto command also, and see if i can get any further info. As always, thanks to both of you for your input, it is very much appreciated.