Built my emonGLCD kit, not working properly

Submitted by Guest on Fri, 13/09/2013 - 18:18

Hi guys,

I got a 868MHz kit the other day and have just finished putting it all together. The rpi and the emontx are working fine and I'm getting excellent power graphs from emoncms.

I'm having trouble with my emonGLCD, though. I just completed the build, uploaded the firmware and tested it out but it's not receiving any messages from the emonTX. The screen works fine, the tester firmware runs properly and registers all buttons and the temperature sensor is working fine, too. I *think* the radio may not be working, as the temperature is not being sent to the raspi base station, either.

I did a voltage check before soldering the radio on and was running at 3.29v from my FTDI cable supply.

You'll note that I didn't use the the ceramic 100nF caps in every location - the kit was 2 short, so I popped down to maplin and all they had were these: (the 0.1 micro farad one) http://www.maplin.co.uk/metallised-polyester-pet-capacitors-98158

Any ideas for how to debug this?

Re: Built my emonGLCD kit, not working properly

Submitted by Chilly (not verified) on Fri, 13/09/2013 - 18:22.

Just to be clear, the actual symptom is that I'm getting readings of 0-2W on the main display. In reality, the draw at the time was around 1kW for the whole house.

Stuff I've checked/tried:

checked the RF frequencies are set properly in all firmware

checked the channels and node IDs are set properly (channel same everywhere, node ids all unique)

Re: Built my emonGLCD kit, not working properly

Submitted by Robert Wall on Fri, 13/09/2013 - 22:39.

It doesn't sound like the problem, but have you set the emonTx node in the GLCD sketch (to tell it which node to listen to)?

If you are seeing small numbers, it would seem that the GLCD is receiving something, just not what you expect. What do you see on the serial monitor for the values in the Payload structure if you have DEBUG defined? (I'm assuming you are using emonGLCD_SolarPV.ino).

Re: Built my emonGLCD kit, not working properly

Submitted by Chilly (not verified) on Sat, 14/09/2013 - 20:57.

Ah, figured it out. It was using the wrong data field from the emontx data packet. It assumes you're using current sensor 1 and I happen to be using 3 for no good reason. Changed that and we're cooking on gas!

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