After a recent reboot my iotawatt is in a weird state:
the led flashes red briefly every ±8 seconds
I can still access iotawatt.local, but ‘status’ input and output is empty, and neither of the graph plugins show actual data when I select what I want to see
home assistant no longer connects to iota watt
I also have the impression the web interface is very slow but this is subjective
Steps executed in attempt to resolve:
replace power supply
manually update firmware
reflash sd card
All without effect. Any other suggestions for things to try?
I don’t have a spare sd card lying around, but the one in there is relatively new (±6 months), formatted fine and I put a clean install on it, do you expect a different result with a new sd card?
While your reported symptoms don’t fit any known problems, just sayin that virtually all problems not obviously WiFi turn out to be SDcard problems.
When someone tells me that they manually updated the firmware, I stop trying to diagnose remotely.
If you want to send me the unit, I can test it and return for shipping cost. If it needs repair, I’ll charge for parts with a maximum $60 + shipping if I have to just replace the entire PCB.
Manual updating is covered in some old posts in the forum. It involves downloading the release file, uploading it to the IoTaWatt and issuing the update command. But you reported that your unit was and is unresponsive so you could not have done that. I’m left with suspecting that you reflashed the unit from a binary of the release firmware. There are a few variables there and I a few things that can go wrong.
When I’m unsure of what the original problem presentation was and the user reports trying things like reflashing, I start to suspect there could now be a compound problem resulting from those efforts.
Sure I could have a long detailed Q&A dialog on this forum to try to sort it out, but I’m also confident that I could fix your unit in about 10 minutes if you send it in. A much better use of my time.
To clarify, the IoTaWatt was not fully unresponsive. I could still reach the web interface and performed the update that way. However, the device was in some weird state, where the led blinked red every ±8s, and did not return any measurement data, either in the UI or via home assistant.
Today I installed a new sd card but the problem remained.
Then I decided to try to revert to an older firmware, and this seems to have solved the problem (led now green and device returning data), so leaving this here in case anyone else runs into the same problem.
By this account, you should be able to re-install 02.08.03 and recreate the problem, then downgrade again to resolve it. Before recommending this to others, you should do this several times to validate your conclusion.
For anyone else reading this thread, the latest firmware version is 02.08.03 and has been running in thousands of units around the world for nearly a year without any report of a similar issue. So, please don’t try downgrading firmware as a solution to any problem.
The device works fine now and I’m not going to try to break it again. I’m not saying the latest firmware is the problem but from my point of view it seems it somehow got corrupted and installing another firmware fixed my problem.
The process to do this came from a post you made on this forum by the way, so while I appreciate your responsiveness, there is no need for the derogatory tone. I just wanted to get my device fixed without paying $70 for shipping, which I did, and wanted to let others know that while apparently you no longer recommend this method, it fixed my unit.
As discussed above I was able to get measurements again from the device. After a while I noticed that the accumulated wh measurements did not reset at 12am although my timezone was set correctly, and after looking into the iotawatt config interface again, I noticed it seemed to think it was 2021 with some arbitrary date and time, so the RTC was incorrect.
I then updated to latest firmware again, and the device went non functional again with the red led blinking every ±8s, and now the message log claims “RTC not running”. So for some reason, with the older firmware I got an incorrect RTC, and with the new firmware I got no RTC. Not sure why the led wasn’t just red as expected.
I then found a forum topic with similar RTC problems, and they solved it by having iotawatt connect to a hotspot on their phone. This also worked for me, now the RTC is set correctly, and everything seems to be functional with the latest firmware. I guess I still need to figure out why it can’t access time on my regular network to avoid it getting out of sync. I may also need to replace the RTC battery.