Reflashed IoTaWatt - not steady green light, but no factory wifi AP?

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1

I had a IoTaWatt that was configured some time back, but seems to have disappeared off the network for some time.

I power-cycled it, and it did seem to appear on the network at first, but the web interface wasn’t available, and the LED sequence seemed to suggest a MicroSD card issue.

I took apart the unit to get access to the MicroSD card slot.

The card seemed to read fine in my reader, and the JSON in config.json did appear to be valid JSON. Either way, I figured I’d start from a known good state.

Per the instructions here on rebuilding a SD card, I re-formatted the MicroSD card in FAT32, and then copied over the files from the “SD” directory.

Since the unit was open, I also flashed the current firmware. (I relied on some of the instructions here)

I plugged the little ESP-12S into my computer via the MicroUSB port on the board.

I then held down the “FLASH” button, and pressed “RST” once.

From the computer, I ran a chip_id:

victorhooi@Victors-MacBook-Pro-3 ~/c/I/SD (master)> esptool.py -p /dev/tty.usbserial-0001 chip_id
esptool.py v4.7.0
Serial port /dev/tty.usbserial-0001
Connecting....
Detecting chip type... Unsupported detection protocol, switching and trying again...
Connecting....
Detecting chip type... ESP8266
Chip is ESP8266EX
Features: WiFi
Crystal is 26MHz
MAC: 8c:aa:b5:c1:97:5c
Uploading stub...
Running stub...
Stub running...
Chip ID: 0x00c1975c
Hard resetting via RTS pin...

I then flashed the firmware like so:

victorhooi@Victors-MacBook-Pro-3 ~/c/I/SD (master)> esptool.py -p /dev/tty.usbserial-0001 write_flash 0 ~/Downloads/firmware.bin
esptool.py v4.7.0
Serial port /dev/tty.usbserial-0001
Connecting....
Detecting chip type... Unsupported detection protocol, switching and trying again...
Connecting....
Detecting chip type... ESP8266
Chip is ESP8266EX
Features: WiFi
Crystal is 26MHz
MAC: 8c:aa:b5:c1:97:5c
Uploading stub...
Running stub...
Stub running...
Configuring flash size...
Flash will be erased from 0x00000000 to 0x0008bfff...
Compressed 570192 bytes to 400475...
Wrote 570192 bytes (400475 compressed) at 0x00000000 in 35.4 seconds (effective 129.0 kbit/s)...
Hash of data verified.

Leaving...
Hard resetting via RTS pin...

I’ve now plugged in the IoTa Watt (just into the 5V USB power supply, and the 9V reference voltage).

The LED seems to be a steady green (although if you look closely, it does seem to be flashing really really quickly in green).

However, the factory default IoTaWatt wifi SSID didn’t appear. (And it didn’t give any of the LED sequences mentioned in the manual - just the steady green?)

Is there any way to find out what is going on? Or why I can’t seem to configure the wifi?

2

You’ve strayed pretty far off the reservation in your efforts to resolve what is probably an SDcard or WiFi issue.

You don’t ever mention the contents of the message log or having connected the USB to a computer what the serial output shows.

That’s normal operation. In the docs I describe it as a dull green. It is connected to WiFi, has the time set, and is sampling normally.

Right. It only goes into AP mode at startup when it can’t connect to its configured network.

Message log (probably need to remove SDcard and read it on a computer /iotawatt/iotamsgs.txt) or power the unit with USB from your computer and run a terminal like Putty (115,200baud) to get the messages and possibly additional information.