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UtilitechAS / amsreader-firmware

ESP8266 and ESP32 compatible firmware to read, interpret and publish data to MQTT from smart electrical meters, both DLMS and DSMR is supported
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Unstable every now and then #353

Closed shadowano closed 1 year ago

shadowano commented 1 year ago

Describe the bug By looking at the up time in the user interface I see that the firmware can run stable for up to 3 days at best, but for other days it restarts more often. By looking at the "current hour used" in Home Assistant over time I see multiple restarts. See attached screenshot. Every black dots shows a restart (not at the hour).

I remember having more days up time with version 2.1.8, but I don't have any data for this version.

I'm going to use the Pow-U to send data to my HA server and set up a smart system. If it's restarting this often, this will make the system very unstable. Are there any logs we can look at, or find out why it's restarting this often?

Wifi is set to Minimum power saving. Not sure if I can test other settings for my hardware?

To Reproduce

Expected behavior Firmware to be more stable and have weeks of uptime (at least)

Screenshots image image image

Hardware information:

Relevant firmware information:

Additional context

gskjold commented 1 year ago

Maximum power saving is sometimes necessary for pow-u, which was default in 2.1.8. All devices have defaulted to minimum when upgrading to 2.1.12. On top of this, 2.1.12 have a bug where maximum power saving is not working. Please upgrade to 2.1.13 and try maximum power saving.

shadowano commented 1 year ago

Maximum power saving is sometimes necessary for pow-u, which was default in 2.1.8. All devices have defaulted to minimum when upgrading to 2.1.12. On top of this, 2.1.12 have a bug where maximum power saving is not working. Please upgrade to 2.1.13 and try maximum power saving.

I see, thanks, I'll try that and report back :)

btw, thanks a lot for your quick reply, and all your effort on this awesome firmware with lots of feature:) Keep the great work up, it's really appreciated!

ArnieO commented 1 year ago

More info here: https://amsleser.no/blog/post/25-pow-u-and-power-saving

shadowano commented 1 year ago

Since 11 days ago when I changed my wifi Power Saving to maximum there has been 6 restarts. I looked at Last Hour usage sensor in home Assistant and made a small javascript function in Node-Red to identify restarts:)

Is there anything else I can check to find out why it restarts this many times?

image

ArnieO commented 1 year ago

Is there anything else I can check to find out why it restarts this many times?

Monitor Vcc to confirm if the reason is voltage dropping. Pow-U contains a voltage supervisor that disables the microcontroller if the voltage drops below approx 2.9V. It will be held disabled while the supercap charges, until voltage reaches 3.2V.

shadowano commented 1 year ago

If VVC is the reason it will help to connect it to power, right? Not sure if VVC is sent to HA, but will double check when I'm home again

ArnieO commented 1 year ago

Yes - if this is the issue, connecting external power will cure the problem. For more explanation regarding this issue, please see chapter 5 of Pow-U user manual, downloadable from the product page on amsleser.no.

shadowano commented 1 year ago

Doesn't look like the VCC is dropping below 3.1, IF MQTT data is sent when the VSS drops. I guess the IF is important to know when looking in Home Assistant :) image

ArnieO commented 1 year ago

Vcc dropping should will be relatively slow, and reporting to MQTT is done each time the meter reports (each 2.5 or 10 second, depending on the meter). So all measurements should go to Home Assistant, then there is of course the question if HA stores and displays all values or does some averaging before making the graph (other users here might know?). Was that a reboot at around 5:00 pm? I cannot rule out an electronic malfunction in your device (e.g. too slow energy harvesting from M-bus). I'd be happy to swap your board with a new one to see if it helps; please contact me: post@amsleser.no.

bardahlm commented 1 year ago

So all measurements should go to Home Assistant, then there is of course the question if HA stores and displays all values or does some averaging before making the graph (other users here might know?).

You can adjust the time interval to a short one to get the most details.

image

shadowano commented 1 year ago

Sorry for late response, and thanks @ArnieO for your support and help. The last restart/crash the firmware/hardware did was 11 hours ago. I identified the value being sent to HA was 0 at 00:53:41 (included +1 hour for Norway):

state: "0.0" date: "2022-11-28T23:53:41.831694+00:00"

At 00:53:37 HA shows that the VCC dropped to only 3.25. I do also find two places last 7 days where VCC dropped to 2.95 and 2.92. Other drops are not below 3, but two are close at 3.07 and 3.09. image

I have connected power to the Pow-U today, and will let it run for some time to just verify nothing else is causing this.

ArnieO commented 1 year ago

I have connected power to the Pow-U today, and will let it run for some time to just verify nothing else is causing this.

Looking forward to the update! Vcc drops to around 2.9V with Power saving set to Maximum is a quite clear indication it has rebooted due to voltage drop.

Kindly run with power a few days, then contact me at post@amsleser.no to arrange a replacement.

shadowano commented 1 year ago

Here is a graph before and after connecting power to the Pow-U, and it's easy to spot when that happened:) Is this an indication of "bad" hardware, @ArnieO?

image

ArnieO commented 1 year ago

and it's easy to spot when that happened:)

Wild guess: šŸ¤£ image

Thank you very much - that graph is very interesting, there is a lot of information here.

First, this indicates that the voltage drops you see is somehow linked to the energy harvesting from M-bus not being sufficient to maintain Vcc when device is powered from M-bus.

But there is more to it: I struggle to understand the voltage steps. There is a huge supercapacitor (1 F) to keep Vcc stable. Huge capacitor and voltage steps is a strange combination.

I agree, there must be some kind of hardware issue here; could be a consumption issue in the ESP, could be a supercap that is in some way faulty, could be an issue with the buck converter controller... Difficult to say.

@shadowano: Please contact me on post@amsleser.no so that I can identify you and send you a replacement board!

shadowano commented 1 year ago

After receiving the new unit, and importing the configuration (without secrets as that didn't work), I see the MQTT publish topic has some weird characters. I don't remember what I had, but I believe it was /data in the end and nothing else.

image

gskjold commented 1 year ago

Thanks for reporting, I will check if I am able to reproduce this. The config file is human readable, so you should be able to open it in ex. notepad. Could you check if there are more options than publish topic that are affected?

shadowano commented 1 year ago

It is correctly stored as

mqttPublishTopic ams/reader/data

in the config file. Screenshot from Notepad++ for reference. I haven't seen any other issues after importing.

image