Hi All,
Firstly, thank you for accepting me into this forum.
I have been using the SX1272 for a number of years to create a very simple private network.
My network consists of a number (up to 100) of SX1272 as sensor nodes and one or two SX1272 as receivers. Each node reports into the receivers every hour. There is no synchronisation between the receivers and the sensors, but if a node does not receive and acknowledge it will wait a random amount of time before re-trying.
I now have over 1000 sensors installed and mostly thing are working well.
My issue is that occasionally (it could be a week or up to three months) the receiver will effectively “lock up” and stop receiving any data or communicating with the controlling microprocessor (Microchip PIC). When this happens, the only way to recover is to carry out a full hardware reset on the SX1272.
When I was developing the firmware for the receivers, I noticed that occasionally, if I had a breakpoint in my code for debugging, even when the breakpoints were nothing to do with the SX1272, if the SX1272 received a signal whilst the pic was halted, I could no longer communicate with the SX1272 and would have to carry out a hardware reset.
The SX1272 is built using Semtech’s
In order to try and prevent this from happening and, recover if it did, I polled the SX1272 I/O pins in my background loop (normally the pins would create interrupts) and also periodically checked that the receiver buffer was empty. This helped with recovery from a breakpoint, but it would appear that there is still some issue with the devices in the field.
Has anyone else experience this “lock up”, and if so, what is the cause and how do I recover elegantly from it. It appears the when it occurs, all comms with the SX1272 are lost. The PIC is communicating with a hardware SPI port.
Any ideas or assistance would be very much appreciated.
Thanks
Chris