Monthly Archives: July 2021

Seeed LoRa-E5 LowPower problem fix

Posted on by

I had been soak testing Seeed LoRa-E5 equipped TinyCLR and netNF devices for the last couple of weeks and after approximately two days they would stop sending data.

After a pointer to the LowPower section of the Seeed LoRa-E5 manual I realised my code could send the next command within 5ms.

Seeeduino LoRa-E5 AT Command document

I added a 5msec Sleep after the wakeup command had been sent

public Result Wakeup()
{
   // Wakeup the E5 Module
#if DIAGNOSTICS
   Debug.WriteLine($" {DateTime.UtcNow:hh:mm:ss} AT+LOWPOWER: WAKEUP");
#endif
   Result result = SendCommand("+LOWPOWER: WAKEUP", $"A", CommandTimeoutDefault);
   if (result != Result.Success)
   {
#if DIAGNOSTICS
      Debug.WriteLine($" {DateTime.UtcNow:hh:mm:ss} AT+LOWPOWER: WAKEUP failed {result}");
#endif
      return result;
   }

   // Thanks AndrewL for pointing out delay required in section 4.30 LOWPOWER
   Thread.Sleep(5);

   return Result.Success;
}

The updated code is has been reliably running on TinyCLR and netNF devices connected to The Things Industries for the last 4 days.

Seeed LoRa-E5 LowPower problem

Posted on by

I have been soak testing Seeed LoRa-E5 equipped TinyCLR and netNF devices for the last couple of weeks and after approximately two days they would stop sending data. The code is still running but The Things Industries device live data tab is empty.

I have reviewed the code line by line and it looks okay. When I run the application on the device with the debugger attached the device does not stop transmitting (a heisenbug) which is a problem.

First step was to disable the sleep/wakeup power conservation calls and see what happens

#if PAYLOAD_COUNTER
   Debug.WriteLine($"{DateTime.UtcNow:hh:mm:ss} Send Timeout:{SendTimeout.TotalSeconds} Seconds payload Counter:{PayloadCounter}");
#if CONFIRMED
   result = device.Send(BitConverter.GetBytes(PayloadCounter), true, SendTimeout);
#else
   result = device.Send(BitConverter.GetBytes(PayloadCounter), false, SendTimeout);
#endif
   PayloadCounter += 1;
#endif

   if (result != Result.Success)
   {
      Debug.WriteLine($"Send failed {result}");
   }

   /*
   Debug.WriteLine($"{DateTime.UtcNow:hh:mm:ss} Sleep");
   result = device.Sleep();
   if (result != Result.Success)
   {
      Debug.WriteLine($"Sleep failed {result}");
      return;
   }
   */
   Thread.Sleep(60000);
   /*
   Debug.WriteLine($"{DateTime.UtcNow:hh:mm:ss} Wakeup");
   result = device.Wakeup();
   if (result != Result.Success)
   {
      Debug.WriteLine($"Wakeup failed {result}");
      return;
   }
   */

The devices have now been running fine for 4.5 days so it looks like it might be something todo with entering and/or exiting low power mode.

.NET Core web API + Dapper – Image Upload

Posted on by

Stream of Bytes or Base64 Encoded

To test my Dapper based functionality to upload images to my World Wide Importers database I used Telerik Fiddler.

Fiddler Composer with the image field name and upload file button highlighted

The currentimplementation only supports the uploading of one image at a time in a field called “image”.

Fiddler console after succesfull upload

This implementation supports a “Content-Type” of “application/octet-stream” or “image/jpeg”.

[HttpPost("{id}/image")]
public async Task<ActionResult> Upload([FromRoute(Name = "id")][Range(1, int.MaxValue, ErrorMessage = "StockItem id must greater than 0")] int id, [FromForm] IFormFile image)
{
	if (image == null) 
	{
		return this.BadRequest("Image image file missing");
	}

	if (image.Length == 0)
	{
		return this.BadRequest("Image image file is empty");
	}

	if ((string.Compare(image.ContentType, "application/octet-stream",true) != 0) && (string.Compare(image.ContentType, "image/jpeg", true) != 0))
	{
		return this.BadRequest("Image image file content-type is not application/octet-stream or image/jpeg");
	}

	try
	{
		using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
		{
			await image.CopyToAsync(ms);

			ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

			using (SqlConnection db = new SqlConnection(this.connectionString))
			{
				DynamicParameters parameters = new DynamicParameters();

				parameters.Add("StockItemId", id);
				parameters.Add("photo", ms, DbType.Binary, ParameterDirection.Input);

				await db.ExecuteAsync(sql: @"UPDATE [WareHouse].[StockItems] SET [Photo]=@Photo WHERE StockItemID=@StockItemId", param: parameters, commandType: CommandType.Text);
			}
		}
	}
	catch (SqlException ex)
	{
		logger.LogError(ex, "Updating photo of StockItem with ID:{0}", id);

		return this.StatusCode(StatusCodes.Status500InternalServerError);
	}

	return this.Ok();
}

After uploading the image I could download it as either a stream of bytes(displayed in Fiddler) or Base64 encoded (this had to be converted to an image)

Fiddler displaying downloaded jpeg image

This implementation doesn’t support the uploading of multiple images or the streaming of larger images but would be sufficient for uploading thumbnails etc.

NOTE : Error Handling approach has been updated