Thermostat loses its date/time setting

[trie]

I'm (or actually: my friend) is using a Intergas compact HR22 boiler with a Honeywell Chronotherm Modulation CMT8851M1000 and version 4.0b1 as firmware.

I would like to start with: what a great hardware AND software this is!

Anyway: my friend has the problem that his thermostat loses its date/time setting every so many minutes (like 2-3 mins). Setting it with "SC=xx:xx/x" works once, after a few minutes it's back to 00:00 again. I can imagine the firmware responds with "nothing" after the initial SC set.

Any ideas?

Edit: this should've been added to the Alpha/Beta topic but apparently it became a seperate topic.

[hvxl]

The gateway doesn't have an accurate enough clock to keep track of the time in any meaningful way. So after an SC command it will only remember and return that value for about 1 minute. After that it is supposed to just acknowledge the time the thermostat provided in the WriteData message. If that isn't happening it's a bug. I would never notice this myself because I have an automated job that sends an SC command to the gateway every minute. (That can also be done by otmonitor 4.0b1.)

[trie]

Exactly what I thought. I don't need the gateway to keep the time, but now it's apparently doing something to the thermostat making it reset to 00:00. As workaround I've implemented the fix you described (set the time every x seconds) but I'd rather have it fixed It did work before the gateway went between the boiler and thermostat so the gateway is doing something to make the thermostat 'break'.

I myself have a Chronotherm Round Modulation so no time stuff so I only discovered it when installing it at my friend's house.

[hvxl]

Can you provide a few minutes of log so I can get a better understanding of what is happening?

[trie]

Can you provide a few minutes of log so I can get a better understanding of what is happening?

Of course! I'll have to get a box with the graphical otmonitor then. It won't work on my Mac Or does otmonitor have an option for console output of the logging?

[hvxl]

Looking at the logs, it seems like once again I fell into my usual trap. The list of alternative messages appears to have become empty. Without alternatives the gateway forwards the Day of week and time of day message to the boiler. The boiler responds with Unk-DataID *and* clears the data bytes. The gateway then confirms those cleared data bytes to the thermostat, instead of restoring the original data bytes. The simplest way around this problem is to put some message that the boiler supports in the list of alternatives. For example via AA=28.

I am a bit surprised that the list of alternatives became empty though. According to my information the Intergas compact HR22 should support MsgID 123, which is on the default list. Did you manually clear the predefined list of alternatives?

[trie]

Looking at the logs, it seems like once again I fell into my usual trap. The list of alternative messages appears to have become empty. Without alternatives the gateway forwards the Day of week and time of day message to the boiler. The boiler responds with Unk-DataID *and* clears the data bytes. The gateway then confirms those cleared data bytes to the thermostat, instead of restoring the original data bytes. The simplest way around this problem is to put some message that the boiler supports in the list of alternatives. For example via AA=28.

I am a bit surprised that the list of alternatives became empty though. According to my information the Intergas compact HR22 should support MsgID 123, which is on the default list. Did you manually clear the predefined list of alternatives?

I haven't cleared the alternatives. Well, I wouldn't know how to, until I just read about it. I don't really understand the "alternative" part yet so I'll read up on that. Is there anything else I could/should do?

[hvxl]

Is there anything else I could/should do?

No, just add at least one message ID the boiler understands.

[hvxl]

Firmware version 4.0b2 has a fix for this problem.

[trie]

Firmware version 4.0b2 has a fix for this problem.

Thanks! It seemed that setting the time once per hour was not enough to keep it synced. Hopefully this is not a problem anymore, testing now!

[trie]

Unfortunately: problem still not resolved... I've been setting the time every hour but the thermostat simply loses its time now and then. When I've set the interval at 60 seconds again the problem (seemingly) does not occur anymore.

I'll see if I can get some logging when it occurs. But it's hard to find the exact moment when the bug hits.

[hvxl]

It's been over a month since you indicated you were going to collect logs. Have you lost interest in this issue or did the fix actually work after all?