MeshCom woes
(MeshCom woes indeed but not MeshCom's fault!)
As mentioned before I have been fiddling with a RAK setup and MeshCom. I had MeshCom running on both the RAK and a T-Beam device, the former connected by Ethernet adapter and running as Internet gateway, the latter by wifi and connecting to the gateway via RF. My aim was to run the RAK node in the loft connected to the 70cm collinear that is already up there and power it from one of the shack Netgear Ethernet switches. However, it has been running on the shack desk powered over USB because of the issue with the PoE board. Also, it was freezing at random intervals and so I have been using 'cu' to log the console debugging information to file to see if there was any error messages.
The board would run like that form one or two days then freeze with no obvious cause - no errors, except twice it froze after a few APRS callsign error messages. Given this and given the plan to run it off a Netgear switch I planned to monitor it and use SNMP to toggle the PoE on the relevant port if it froze. That way it could be run in the loft with no need to access it to reboot it.
However, this evening I unplugged the USB in order to check my monitoring scripts. The scripts worked fine and sent me an alert via DAPNET, but once plugged back in the RAK would only run for five seconds or so. Re-flashing the firmware looked to have sorted that but it froze again after 30 minutes. It seems rather fragile.
I must add that the same firmware version running on the T-Beam has run perfectly well for over a week. I think I’ve spent enough time on this now. I have reassigned the T-Beam to be the gateway and will experiment with making the RAK into a mobile device. Pity the Ethernet interface and PoE board would be of no use then but as always this is all experimental. The T-Beam connects via wifi of course and I need to see if it reconnects as every so often I need to power cycle the access points. But it has anounced itself to the mesh and is aslo running the web server and my monitoring script is keeping watch. Now I just need to relocate it into the loft with a suitably long USB lead or put a Raspberry Pi up there and power it that way. At least this should be stable enough to see if I can drum up some local interest.