New Pi Zero Wireless!


 
RalphTrimble said:
Nice work Bryan! Now if only the pi zero W would become widely available for $10 the bottom line cost of the HM will drop down quite a bit...
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Are they not available already? The microcenter down here in St Louis has probably 100 of them in a little candy rack display near the computer parts help desk thing. I can get it or a $5 pi zero pretty easily. I had ordered one from canakit on Feb 28 and thought it would be to me before the Mar 12 date Microcenter had promised to have them in stores. March 13th rolled around and I still didn't have one, so I drove over to Microcenter (a 25 minute drive for me) hoping to find one, and was amazed they had a ton. If you need one I can probably grab and send you one. I have 2 myself.

On another note, how easy would it be to rebuild my current Heatermeter 4.2 heatermeter with a broken button to the 4.3 setup using one of my new pi zero w's? obviously I'll have to wait until the issues are worked out.
 
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You could rig in individual buttons to your HMv4.2 very easily, the easiest thing would be to use panel mount buttons screwed to your case. If you need help with the wiring start a new thread asking for help and I or someone else will help you work it out. The button circuit(s) are extremely simple.....
 
Seems like a pattern, they have a handful of the $10 units available which quickly sell out leaving the only option to buy the more expensive package deal. That's kinda bogus, hopefully they will eventually have enough single units available so you can actually buy one when you want one.
 
I am really going slowly on this but I've come to realize just how much there is to test (and fail testing). Firmware is working great but for some reason the wifi if entered into config.txt doesn't work on first boot properly, the wifi keeps resetting over and over. Also the update process isn't quite working properly (loses wifi settings, but that is an easy fix I just need to type in). I'll be picking it back up tomorrow and hopefully I can seal the deal here and then I can test the other platforms (Pi A/B regular, Pi 2, Pi 3, and original Zero) to make sure nothing is broken on them by all these changes. Wow I've just realized I need a much larger desk to be able to run tests on all our supported platforms!

It is crazy how many units of the Zero W Microcenter has. I have a friend in Michigan who asked "Have you seen the new Pi? Microcenter has a giant display full of them!" Open more stores, MicroCenter!
 
Success! Everything appears to be working on the Zero W. I haven't posted a snapshot yet because I need to go back through and do regression testing on an A, B+, Pi2, Pi3 and original Zero. Still need to make it so users can upgrade without losing their configuration too, which is a challenge because ideally the code would need to run during the upgrade process but any new code I write will only be there after the upgrade process! That's tomorrow Bryan's problem though.
 
Bryan, thank you for all your hard work! I've gone to the snapshot page, filled in my info, and downloaded the image but it will not connect to my network. The LED says na12 on it about 20 seconds after bootup. Good news is I also downloaded the AP image and that worked fine, but I want the client image. I dug through the config file and looked like my SSID and PW were correctly configured. Any suggestions?

https://goo.gl/photos/o97vYu58penP62c56

JB
 
Well that certainly is unusual. I don't know what the NA12 means and I can't imagine where it is coming from. Does it go away if you press any button on the device or does it stay there? If it goes away, that's a "toast" message and the only one that should be sent should say "Network Address" and the IP on the next line.

As far as not connecting to your wifi, are you looking in the config.txt file on the boot partition? This may not be making it into the wireless config properly if it has certain special characters in it. Would you mind sharing your wireless password with me over a private message? I can try it on my test system to see if that's what the problem is and maybe fix it.

EDIT: Oh hey I just put a display on my test device and it also says NA12. I will look into this and fix whatever is causing that.
 
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Well this is crazy, NA12 is every 8th byte of "/set?tt=Network Address,192.168.2xxxxxx". What's happening is that I'm sending the toast message to display and the Pi is losing the data in between. Its hardware serial buffer is... you guessed it, 8 bytes. If I break the message into 8 byte chunks it loses less data (because there is some overhead to the code). If I delay 1ms between 8 byte chunks I get 5-6 of the 8 bytes, and if I delay 2ms I get all 8. At 38400 baud, which is what we are running, 8 bytes takes 2.0833ms to transmit so it looks like we're running into some sort of buffering problem that is just on the PiW.

Not that it has anything to do with your problem, we'll still need to look into that, but I'm just posting here because now we have a known bug to work on.

EDIT: And the Pi3 as well, _great_!
 
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I tried the snapshot with my rPi zero-W last night. I used the preconfigured wifi DL but it wouldn't connect to my WiFi. Then I tried the AP point build, this time the HEATERMETER hotspot did show up and I was able to connect to it and load the HM web page, so the rPi zero is working, but for some reason the preconfig client WiFi mode will not work. I looked at the config file on the SD card and my wifi SSID and passphrase was listed there, but no dice on the connection. IDK how to go about getting the zero connected to my WiFi at this point, I might have a USB LAN somewhere but am doubting the chipset will be supported. Any ideas?
 
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Ooh this is beginning to become an epidemic! Ralph would you mind PMing me your SSID, password, and encryption mode? It seems I've got something wrong between the PHP page -> custom firmware build -> config.txt -> config_restore(wifi_config) -> wifi-client operation. There's a friggin lot of steps here where something can go wrong and I thought I had tested every combination of special character but clearly I've missed something. If you'd rather send it to my gmail I am heatermeter@capnbry.net.

I did just test it with both a simple ssid/passphrase and a little more "special" one and both seemed to work here in the lab so I am not sure what I am missing.
 
I tinkered a bit more with the rPi zero-w and my router settings tonight....

I turned off security on my wifi and tried to connect with the HM image set for client mode with no security, it did not connect. Then tried the HM image that was set for wpa-2 with my ssid and passphrase and it connected, and after I re-enabled security on the wifi it still connects... I'm not really sure if it was a HM issue or an issue with this router my ISP us using, I'm not fond of this router at all, but it seems all I had to do was drop wifi security for the first connection.

The good news is it is working and I am finding the HM gui to be ridiculously fast! Way faster than any other HM/rPi combo I have run, the pages really pop like NOW! However, when I am loading the graph page I am finding there is about a 5-10 second delay before temps are displayed, it displays "---" on all probes for an unusual amount of time every time the graph page loads.

I am also seeing "NA11" when it should be showing the IP address at boot.

EDIT: I just re-imaged using the latest development snapshot with wifi ssid/wpa2 settings and it connected and showed the proper IP address. It also displays the temps on the probes right away. I think I may have had the "previous snapshot" loaded when I saw "NA11" at boot and slow probe display.
 
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FWIW:

I just switched my HM to a Pi Zero W and used the Pre-configured WiFi snapshot and everything went just fine. On boot up, the HM gave me the IP address (a little different than the one with the RPi 3) and my Linkmeter was there. Also, there seems to be no problem with my HM display either.

Thanks!!

Edited to add: The HM doesn't show up on the device registration page now. The old RPi 3 one is still there but it just times out. Not sure why it doesn't show up with the zero but thought I should let you know.
 
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Thanks for checking in with the information that the Zero worked with the preconfigured image worked!
Paul DC said:
Edited to add: The HM doesn't show up on the device registration page now. The old RPi 3 one is still there but it just times out. Not sure why it doesn't show up with the zero but thought I should let you know.
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I was working on the page this morning and all device registrations were sort of paused while I was making some changes. It should be up now, and your device will appear within an hour, of immediately if you reboot it and wait until the LCD displays the IP address.
 
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