Tag Archives: LowPower

Seeed LoRa-E5 LowPower problem fix

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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

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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.