Latest Software: LinkMeter v13 and firmware


 
Hey Bryan, I have an idea about a new feature that I think would be useful. I run my MicroDamper on both my UDS and my Akorn (and soon I'll have another pit to play around with), and each time I switch between the two I seem to forget to change some sort of value. Would it be difficult to setup profiles that saves PID, fan speed, etc that would be saved to the heatermeter and the user could just click a radio button or drop down list of the pit that they are going to be cooking on? This could also be used to save settings for each pit and it's cooking scenario. Example profile names: "Akorn fan on", "Akorn fan assist", "Akorn fanless", etc etc.

Awesome idea. I do a bit of sous vide now, and this would be a great feature to have when switching from the smoker to the slow cooker.
 
I asked if a "save/load config" option could be added a long time ago and the idea was shot down, not sure if thinking has changed on that at this point or not? I hope so, because it would be very convenient for folks who use their HM on different grills or in different modes to be able to select from saved configs...
 
Hey Bryan, I have an idea about a new feature that I think would be useful. I run my MicroDamper on both my UDS and my Akorn (and soon I'll have another pit to play around with), and each time I switch between the two I seem to forget to change some sort of value. Would it be difficult to setup profiles that saves PID, fan speed, etc that would be saved to the heatermeter and the user could just click a radio button or drop down list of the pit that they are going to be cooking on? This could also be used to save settings for each pit and it's cooking scenario. Example profile names: "Akorn fan on", "Akorn fan assist", "Akorn fanless", etc etc.
Just create a bookmark the "Full configuration URL" from the configuration page for each profile and name it whatever you want. Clicking this will set all the parameters in HeaterMeter at once.

EDIT: Oops didn't realize there was another page. But yeah I see the merit to having it integrated, but there's an overwhelming amount of UI that comes along with profile management that I don't want to write.
 
Just create a bookmark the "Full configuration URL" from the configuration page for each profile and name it whatever you want. Clicking this will set all the parameters in HeaterMeter at once.

EDIT: Oops didn't realize there was another page. But yeah I see the merit to having it integrated, but there's an overwhelming amount of UI that comes along with profile management that I don't want to write.

LAZY! Just messing with ya. Good to know about the saving the config as a bookmark though. Thanks all
 
It's been a while since i've taken a peek at this site... My heatermeter 4.2.4 has been chugging along without major issues.

Glad to see that there is an update with new features, and also the Micro damper thread just got me hooked again. Ordered some parts, had the micro damper shell printed, now just waiting on the parts to come in from various sources.

Now comes my problem that I've experienced several times (ie. bug is repeatable)

I was running V12 on my HM 4.2.4, with RPi B. Saw this thread and decided to update the firmware.

The update from V12 to V13 went flawlessly (updated via web configuration). The first reboot (initiated by the flashing process), all my settings were there, as well as WiFi (Ralink WU715N), reconnected back to my network without issues.

Upon a 2nd reboot (power off/on by me), nothing on the RPi worked. however, the AVR was OK, I was able to at least use the heatermeter directly without any remote access via RPi.

Upon further testing, I noticed that always on the 2nd reboot that my SD card on the RPi becomes corrupted, so much so that windows can't read the card and asks to format it. So I re-image back to V12 to get everything up and running (good thing I had a config back up that I can apply).

Tried the upgrade to V13 again. Same problem.
I tried the trick:
1) Disconnect hetermeter from RPi,
2) Boot up RPi only and SSH into it
3) Delete the linkmeter file under /etc/uci-defaults/linkmeter
4) reconnect the Heatermeter to Rpi and start up again

The above works for only 1 boot cycle. Everytime I reboot again, my SD card becomes corrupted and have to start back from V12 again.

NOTE: With the HM disconnected, I can boot and reboot the Rpi without the problem occurring.

So pretty much now, I'm just looking for some suggestions, or traces I can access/provide to you if need be, any configuration files, or something to try I'm all ears! Or I could be a total idiot and done something wrong!..

Thanks for all the help, and support!
 
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Did you try writing V13 to your SD card from your PC and then booting from that?

I recall at some point an upgrade that didn't go smoothly if you retained your config after the reboot, so you might want to backup your config or take a snapshot or notes and then do the upgrade and allow it to reset your config.
 
Did you try writing V13 to your SD card from your PC and then booting from that?

I recall at some point an upgrade that didn't go smoothly if you retained your config after the reboot, so you might want to backup your config or take a snapshot or notes and then do the upgrade and allow it to reset your config.

Thanks for the reply.. But I believe I did try the v13 straight onto the card among my many retrys and sadly had the same results. Not sure what about the heatermeter is causing the corruption of my SD card. Without the HM, the Rpi works whether v12 or v13.

I even tried clean v12 to v13 with skipping the restore of my config file.
 
Well I think I solved my own problem.

Culprit was the SD card. For some reason this particular one would not work with V13, not sure why. But anyhow, I swapped it out for a 1GB microSD card that was previously in a really old "Smartphone". Took it out, and put it in an SDcard adapter. And tried straight to V13 with that one, then restore my settings. Worked without any problems. Wifi came back, along with my other settings.

Now just waiting for the micro damper parts to come in and I should be set.
 
Hi, I have been having good success with my rotodamper 3, but I tried something new today which puzzled me. I set the minimum fan speed to 10% to try to keep my wood chips smoking, but as soon as the temp was above target the fan dropped to 0%. Does that setting not constrain the minimum fan speed to be above some low limit? Thanks, Web
 
Hi, I have been having good success with my rotodamper 3, but I tried something new today which puzzled me. I set the minimum fan speed to 10% to try to keep my wood chips smoking, but as soon as the temp was above target the fan dropped to 0%. Does that setting not constrain the minimum fan speed to be above some low limit? Thanks, Web
There is no setting to keep the fan running at all times. The minimum fan speed (from the wiki)
min - Minimum blower speed. If the desired output is below this, the output will be pulsed between OFF and MIN proportional to the desired speed over a 10 second period.
For example, if set to 10% and the HeaterMeter wants to output 5%, it will pulse on and off at 10% speed but 50% duty cycle. 0% output would be 10% blower at 0% duty cycle which is effectively off.
 
Ah. Thank you. I suppose that I could raise the pulse duty cycle on the bottom and that would keep the vent a little bit open.
 
Hello, Having some difficulties here getting the Raspberry Pi image to start up on a B+ v1.2. It looks like the kernel boots, then I see nothing from init or the startup. I've tried two different 16GB and one 8GB SD card. RPi runs fine with a fresh Raspian install. Image is from http://heatermeter.com/devel/release/bcm2708/13/openwrt-rpi.gz .

In order to try and debug things, I've tried running without the heater meter (just the RPi). The result is the same as with the HM attached. If I pass init=/bin/sh in cmdline.txt, it does start the Busybox shell, although I'm not able to type into it.

I enabled the serial console and saw a load of "Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address" messages. I read online that this can be caused by an incompatibility between the kernel and the USB hardware. I tried copying the kernel (and a few other random files) from the Raspian boot partition and that does seem to make the system start up. I guess I could turn the serial console off again and hook it up to the HM, but I'd rather sort the booting issue out before risking frying anything.

Anyone got any ideas or seen anything similar?
 
Errr that is odd, you shouldn't get those "Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address" messages because that's a crash and that should not be happening. If you're getting a kernel oops, there's no way it is going to boot and run properly. Are you doing this with nothing plugged into USB, just HDMI? Because we run on fixed hardware, it has to be either a USB device or the SD card that isn't working. We do use a pretty old kernel so there's a chance that some incompatibility between one of these things has been fixed and that's why it works with the official new kernel but not on HeaterMeter.
 
Yes, it's very strange and has troubled me for the past few evenings. Nothing is plugged into the USB ports, and I have my HP monitor plugged into the HDMI. I'll try a different monitor later in case it's something like the EDID from the monitor. I think I've tried both with and without the ethernet cable connected, but I'll try that as well. There are a few variations on the Pi hardware, but it sounds as if the B+ is a supported one. I have the 1.2 variant on that, but not sure what that changes from the B+ 1.0.

I did try and build from source following https://github.com/CapnBry/HeaterMeter/wiki/Building-OpenWrt-from-Source . That looked to fail as an SVN repo is not available. I read that it has since moved to git and that this has been fixed in openwrt. Perhaps the Heater Meter changes need rebasing onto a newer openwrt base, but that's not always a trivial thing to do.
 
Hmm, still no joy with this. I tried a different TV and removing the Ethernet cable.

I rebased the patched openwrt to the tip of the 12.09 repo and built from source. With a little tweaking, it built OK and I didn't get the SVN repo not available error. The Pi does exactly the same thing though. Tried another SD - same deal. I tried flashing a vanilla 12.09 openwrt image, but that didn't even seem to start the kernel or show anything on screen. Just to check I don't have a dodgy setup, I flashed Raspian again, and it worked fine...

Maybe I need to track down an older model PI for this. Most available here seem to be B+ or newer though.
 
It says "Raspberry Pi Model B+ V1 2"

Raspian indicates it is rev 0010, which makes it a B+ 1.0 board:
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
model name : ARMv6-compatible processor rev 7 (v6l)
BogoMIPS : 697.95
Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp java tls
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0xb76
CPU revision : 7

Hardware : BCM2708
Revision : 0010
Serial : 00000000f8cc782e
 

 

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