WC8 boards rebooting.

Tim,
 
We keep running the test board and monitor it.  we want to duplicate the problem, then we can fix it for you.
 
In our lab, our power supplies are 12V10A and 12V30A power supplies.  When we running long term test, we adjust the pot on the switching power supply to lower it to 11V. some can be lowered to 10V.  Our power main to the lab is by a 48V battery backup 5000W DC/AC UPS.  We plan to add solar panel charger to charge the battery during the day in the near future.
 
If you search "12V switch power supply " on eBay, you can find a lot of those from 3A, 10A, 20A lab power supply. Most of them has a little pot for adjusting output voltage.  Most 12V power supply can be reliably adjusted to 11V, some of them can be adjusted to 10V.  Most 9V power supply is power cube kind of supply that is less reliable than those lab power supply.
 
I am not saying your power supply caused problem.  But a lot of problems were caused by the power.  Since your power was working fine before, lets keep working on it, till we find the cause for it.
 
I wonder if it would be worthwhile trying a lower power wallwart switching supply rather then a high quality high current lab supply. With the lab supply loaded to only a few milliamps it will be able hide lots of power line problems.
 
As an aside I've found a variable speed electric drill (universal motor) makes a good noise source to do crude testing.
 
/tom
 
The board we put up testing on the 16th still running without rebooting. It has been over 10 days.  We will keep running it to see if that board ever rebooting.
 
Thanks for the status update. It should have rebooted by now...The trouble with this is that my boards reboot so randomly that it is hard to put a finger on any 1 cause.
 
Thanks again,
Tim
 
We loaded your PLC code, only change to your PLC code was no WEBSET calls, because we have no ISY99 to receive calls.  We also have lot of people doing WEBSET all day not having problem.
 
Have you put a long sleep in the beginning of your PLC code, so that from ISY99 log you can tell when it was rebooted and sequence leading to it?  I am sure you are very frustrated, but if we can not duplicate the problem, we can not suggest how to fix it.
 
You also mentioned the boards were running fine with older PLC program.  Is that possible to have your spare board loaded with your older PLC program to see if that can stay on?
 
Yes, I put a long sleep in start section and modified ISY program that watches for heartbeat webset.
I am not frustrated with you, I know you are doing everything you can to help and I appreciate it. I also know that it is a problem on my side, the frustrating thing is the wait time between reboots!

Thanks very much,
Tim
 
Hi Tim,
 
You had reliable setup before, please try to restore the spare board to that and test, to see if that is still the same. If not, then the problem is caused by environment or hardware.  We will keep working with you till your issue is resolved.
 
Hello all,
 
I wanted to wrap this thread up and let you that it looks like my wc8’s rebooting is a thing of the past now.
It appears I was having 2 separate issues.
I have a total of 3 wc8 in service and 1 spare wired up for testing. The one wc8 which rebooted way more than the others is installed in my wiring closet. It would reboot it seemed like every 3 or 4 days to a week, sometimes sooner. The others rebooted every week or two.
 
Cai sent me an email with some test firmware to try on a couple of occasions. After installing the last test firmware the board in the wiring closet rebooted in 2 days leading me to think it didn’t have any effect on the problem. At that point I decided to unplug the two devices from the relay outputs of the wc8 and plug them into an extension cord plugged into the wall (same receptacle which is supplying power to the wc8 power supply). I didn’t want the devices having their power cutting out randomly any more when the wc8 rebooted.
Low and behold more than a week went by and I noticed the wc8 had not rebooted! That left me wondering if it was noise or spikes generated by one of the two devices I had unplugged from the relay outputs. I had a couple of X10 filters so I plugged one onto each relay output then plugged the two devices into the filters. The long and short of it….the wc8 has not rebooted since 2/22/14! During that period of time, at some point, I realized also that none of the other boards had rebooted since installing the test firmware either!
 
I want to sincerely thank all of you for your replies and suggestions and I want to especially thank Cai for all of their behind the scenes help and support. You guys are the greatest!!!
 
Tim
 
I am having issues with what I believe to be noise on the powerline, which is causing wc8 to hang for a while, then it will run but one wire temp sensors will alternate between ok and fail, with it very difficult to get more than one rom code to register.  In the environment there are many noise producing pieces of equipment and filtering each of them will be quite costly.  When I shut everything off and let the wc8 power supply run off of a UPS then it runs smooth, with many temp sensors working fine.  As soon as lighting and motor loads are brought back online temp sensors disappear and clock starts to hang intermitently.  Right now, I do not have anything hooked up to ttl outputs, or any of the inputs besides one-wire bus.  WC8 is in a steel enclosure which is grounded and temp sensor cable is a shielded Cat5e, with one end bonded to the enclosure.  I have all equipment running on analog controls as of now, but need to get them onto the wc8 for Openremote to become user interface and communicate between three wc8's.  Right now I have been struggling with just one to run reliably.  I know the answer is out there, and I believe the guidance I need is here!
 
Thanks,
 
Nick Bright
 
Nick,
 
What is your WC8 firmware version?  A lot of noise is from power line. If you have a good 12V power supply, then use one regulator to regulate that 12V power to 9V again, that two stage regulation can help a lot on reducing power line noise.
 
I have v03.02.17 running on the board I have been fighting with.  Any particularly good regulator you could recommend, or just a radioshack cheepo?  I am using a switchable LED power supply that I have dialed down to 11 volts.  This supply is centrally located and is feeding wc8 in question via an unshielded cat 5 about 25 feet away.  I will try the regulator I have on hand, as this project is a bit remote and I only make it out here a couple times a month.
 
Thanks for the great support,
 
Nick
 
25 feet of Cat 5 is pretty long. But 11 volts should be more than high enough to make up for voltage drop.
 
1) If you have a scope be interesting to see what the power input to the WC looks like.
 
2) Don't connect the negative power input to any of the remote logic, keep power and analog/digital grounds separate. If they are common the voltage drop across the - power lead will affect inputs and outputs.
 
If you want to try a local regulation get one of the cheap buck down converters on eBay, still need to keeps the grounds separate even with local regulation.
 
http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-DC-DC-Buck-Converter-Step-Down-Module-LM2596-Power-Supply-Output-1-23V-30V-T7-/121208203049?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c38926729
 
/tom
 
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