Back in 1986 in my second first year at the University of Canterbury I did “MATH131 Numerical Methods” which was a year of looking at why mathematics in FORTRAN, C, and Pascal sometimes didn’t return the result you were expecting…

While testing my GHI Electronics TinyCLR2 RAK Wireless RAK811 LoRaWAN client I noticed the temperature numbers didn’t quite match…

I have implemented my own Cayenne Low Power Payload encoder in C# based on the sample Mbed C code

uint8_t CayenneLPP::addTemperature(uint8_t channel, float celsius) {
    if ((cursor + LPP_TEMPERATURE_SIZE) > maxsize) {
        return 0;
    }
    int16_t val = celsius * 10;
    buffer[cursor++] = channel; 
    buffer[cursor++] = LPP_TEMPERATURE; 
    buffer[cursor++] = val >> 8; 
    buffer[cursor++] = val; 

    return cursor;
}

My translation of that code to C#

public void TemperatureAdd(byte channel, float celsius)
{
   if ((index + TemperatureSize) > buffer.Length)
   {
      throw new ApplicationException("TemperatureAdd insufficent buffer capacity");
   }

   short val = (short)(celsius * 10);

   buffer[index++] = channel;
   buffer[index++] = (byte)DataType.Temperature;
   buffer[index++] = (byte)(val >> 8);
   buffer[index++] = (byte)val;
}

After looking at the code I think the issues was most probably due to the representation of the constant 10(int32), 10.0(double), and 10.0f(single) . To confirm my theory I modified the client to send the temperature with the calculation done with three different constants.

After some trial and error I settled on this C# code for my decoder

public void TemperatureAdd(byte channel, float celsius)
{
   if ((index + TemperatureSize) > buffer.Length)
   {
      throw new ApplicationException("TemperatureAdd insufficent buffer capacity");
   }

   short val = (short)(celsius * 10.0f);

   buffer[index++] = channel;
   buffer[index++] = (byte)DataType.Temperature;
   buffer[index++] = (byte)(val >> 8);
   buffer[index++] = (byte)val;
}

I don’t think this is specifically an issue with the TinyCLR V2 just with number type used for the constant.