Author Topic: Mailbox notifier only showing RX_RSSI  (Read 2403 times)

james_s

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Mailbox notifier only showing RX_RSSI
« on: November 16, 2019, 12:35:58 AM »
A while back I built a variation of the second version of the mailbox notifier code using a RFM12b which has been working well. I modified the design so that instead of using a display I have the receiver in a box that lights up when the mailbox has been opened and then there is a reset button to clear it after the mail is collected and an LED that indicates low battery in the transmitter. I simplified the transmitter by omitting the regulator and powering it directly from a CR123A cell measuring the battery by internally measuring Vcc and using a little mercury tilt switch instead of a hall sensor.

Fast forward to now I decided to build a couple more of them for other people now using the newer RFM69. I started with version 3 of the mailbox notifier code which is built around the RFM69. It sends the open and close events when the transmitter is triggered however during the idle periods instead of sending last open, last closed and battery voltage it is only sending rssi, example '[9]    [RX_RSSI:-42]'. Wondering if I broke something with my modifications I started over and put the originally supplied v3 code on both the tx and rx and still I just get RSSI. Is there something missing from this code? Unfortunately I'm more of a hardware guy so I've been feeling a tad dense trying to work out the details of how the data is packaged, sent and unpackaged. If I enable debugging on the tx I do get the LO, LC and VBat on that end so I suspect the issue is with the receiver. If I could get a few pointers here that would be great. It's probably something obvious that I'm overlooking.

TomWS

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Re: Mailbox notifier only showing RX_RSSI
« Reply #1 on: November 16, 2019, 05:57:59 PM »
I don't specifically know how the notifier code is written, but your symptom sounds like there is an issue synchronizing packets which is typically a result of ACKs getting lost and/or wasting time printing debug info rather than sending ACKs right away.

james_s

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Re: Mailbox notifier only showing RX_RSSI
« Reply #2 on: November 16, 2019, 10:00:47 PM »
I don't think that's it, the RFM69 modules seem to communicate very reliably in general, this seems to be a bug in the code, or maybe it was changed in this version to not display that data? The open and close events send just fine.

All of the code is here: https://github.com/LowPowerLab/MailboxNotifier

This obviously doesn't incorporate any of my changes but since I tried the completely stock unmodified code and had the same issue with v3 I don't think that matters.

james_s

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Re: Mailbox notifier only showing RX_RSSI
« Reply #3 on: November 18, 2019, 12:43:36 AM »
Well I figured it out, the transmitter wasn't sending a struct, I changed it to do that and then massaged the receiver code into what I wanted, using some bits from the v2 code. The libraries work well but several of the examples that come with the RFM69 library are buggy and won't even compile without changes. Just silly simple stuff like the SPI flash pin definition completely missing and such.