Nodo Gateway unresponsive for a while

[aracdin]

Hi,

I'd be grateful for any help on this:
Viessmann Vitodens 100-W WBIB <-> Nodostore Gateway (with ESP8266 programmed with JeeLabs) <-> Honeywell T6R

When directly connected, the Opentherm link works (although it tends to CS=10 a lot ).

Gateway <->Boiler - works every time. BUT, when I plug in the thermostat, the PIC goes unresponsive.
After several hours, the PIC started to respond again.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[hvxl]

Can you describe the situation more clearly? I can't make much sense of what you wrote.

What do you mean by "directly connected"? What is "to CS=10 a lot"? What are the symptoms when "the PIC goes unresponsive"? Does it produce any output? Does it react to any serial commands? How do you observe that "the PIC started to respond again"?

[aracdin]

Thanks for the reply - and sorry the problem statement wasn't clear.

Directly connected: When the thermostat is connected directly to the boiler with no Gateway, they communicate, but although the thermostat indicates it is calling for heat, the Opentherm data provided by the thermostat gives a Control Setpoint of 10 Celsius, so the boiler didn't actually heat.

If I now connect the Gateway to the boiler only, communication is established and I can alter the various parameters, see the communications in the log and the house gets warm again.

When I now plug in the thermostat (without powering down), the log traffic stops and the transmit LED stops. I left it a few hours to think about it and the LED/ logging restarted.

On one occasion, the ESP8266 stopped responding too, so I added a little more capacitance on the 5V supply although I don't think it made any difference.


Current situation - it has been running well for 14 days , but all this work has been done with the Gateway in an easily accessible location, so at some point I have to power it off to mount in the correct location .

[aracdin]

OK, I think I finally corrected all my mistakes, so I thought I'd list what I think I learnt - there may be errors below.

To start

Thanks to Shelte and Nodo

Read http://otgw.tclcode.com/ several times.

The guys at Nodo Shop are helpful if you are having a problem

Nodo Board Watchdog

The ESP-Easy software can drive this [set Tools>Advanced>WD I2C Address to 38 decimal]. It looks like it times out after about 2 Seconds and resets the ESP8266. The software feeds it from the "Once per second task".

I was using the Jee_Labs ESP-Link software which doesn't know about the watchdog, so it wasn't setting it up. As it wasn't set up, the watchdog didn't trigger but, when I hung a logic analyzer on the line I saw rare, random spikes to 0Volts - one of these might be long enough to reset or confuse the ESP8266 - I think this was why my ESP-Link based system was having problems. These spikes might be because the default setup for the I/O line wasn't pull-up - but I did the obvious thing and changed to ESP-Easy

ESP-Easy Reset of the PIC

There is an option in the Serial Server Device software to send a 0.5 second reset signal to the PIC when the ESP8266 boots [set Communication - Serial Server>Reset Target after Boot to GPIO14 (D5) ]

Occasional "SE' Errors from the PIC

Check you haven't allowed logging to Serial Stream...it outputs a regular health message to the PIC [Tools>Advanced>Serial Log Level should be set to "None"]

Thermostat keeps sending the same message to the Gateway

Check the reference voltage is correctly set [OT Monitor>Settings] - mine were borderline and one step on the voltage had the communications working well.

Other

Otmonitor has a command line switch [otmonitor --daemon] that disables the tcl graphics interface but leaves the web-server interface running, it means I can run OTMonitor on my Pi-zero W without it's graphical desktop running.

There is a recent command added to the PIC PR=Q (reason for last reset)

On the NoDo
Rxd PIC -> ESP
TxD ESP -> PIC