V14 Woes

I hadn't yet jumped on the V14 train until today and things went pretty badly.

I downloaded the latest appropriate stable release from Heatermeter.com, updated via the UI preserving the config, flashed the AVR, and went off to the races.

Everything seemed normal until I wanted to do some tweaking and found that I was losing wifi connection with the HM frequently. It would just not respond. So, I went outside and went wired and had the same issue.

Then I realized that my food probe settings were on "custom" with some settings I never entered. (I use Thermoworks Pro for food probes)

To make things weirder, the blower / servo settings were blank and I could not change them. I would enter values into the fields, but the apply button would not work. The heatermeter was keeping temps +/- 5 degrees, so I know that *some* values were in there somewhere.

I fired up my other HM which was still on V13, entered the settings I wanted on the V14, copied the config link and pasted it into the V14 HM. Things improved, but I still couldn't directly edit the blower / fan settings.

Even wired, the V14 HM would frequently just disappear and not respond. The only way I could communicate with it again was to reboot. The V13 was solid as ever wired and wireless.

At one point, the Pi said that the linkmeter wasn't present. Reboot.

So, after a lot of frustration, I pulled the plug on V14 and put the V13 in. Everything is fine now, but I'm wondering if anyone might have some insight as to what went wrong and how I might fix it before I completely wipe the V14 box and start over with a new config.

Thank you.

I would suggest trying the latest snapshot release build for your specific rPi board and see how that does. If you have trouble with that then the rPi version and wifi model may be relevant for troubleshooting.

Heatermeter 4.2, Raspberry Pi B, Edimax wi-fi.

I'm sure Bryan's servers clocked my desperation as heatermeter.com/devices got a workout from my address today.

I could understand it with the Edimax, but wired?

Yeah the client mode for Edimax modules in v14 is garbage. I had heard it worked fine in the pre-14 snapshot and only did minor testing myself. It worked so it ended up going to release. After there were some complaints I started some longer test and it is just awful. The newer snapshot reverts to a different driver which only has client mode support, not AP, but is very stable in client mode.

As far as the blank stuff on the config page, that's something that can happen with any version. It just means there was an error getting those settings from the device, usually due to a serial problem. The easy fix is to just hit the Reboot AVR button on the page, which will re-fetch the config from the device. IIRC, there are also new coefficients for the thermoworks probes in the v14 version, which is why your probes would up as custom.

Plugging into the wired, did you have both the wifi module inserted and the network cable? There's some weirdness that can occur when both are plugged in and have valid addresses where the system can receive data but doesn't know where to send it back to.

I've been seeting this quite a bit, too. I haven't gotten around to posting about it because I wasn't sure how to go about troubleshooting most of the suggested causes. But, since you brought it up....

Normally, I think the first thing I notice is that the browser page is not current. I often compare the time stamp of the PC with the HM page. At that point, I refresh my browser window and the page hangs. Then, I go to the configuration page and see this. I'll try the Reboot AVR trick. But, what I've been doing (which seems to work) is I SSH in and kill http processes. I think they are actually spelled "uhttpd". I've tried updating the firmware. But, didn't seem to make a difference.



EDIT: To add detail.

If I'm not mistaken, I want to say that my phone which is generally routing out of the house to my domain name and back in will continue to work while the PC (or PCs) in the house are having trouble just routing to a local IP address. However, that screenshot is from my phone. So, it's not immune to the problem. But, if it were hardware, you'd expect all instances to behave the same way.