Voltage sag/interruption can cause OS 2.1 to boot up with microSD disabled

[Leo]

I experienced this twice with OS 2.1 (FW 2.1.6 (1)). I have a pair of OS 2.1 with one configured as master, and the other as a remote station. One day (after a short power interruption) I noticed that the remote station wasn’t watering. So I rebooted both the master and remote station and set up a node to monitor traffic from the master, assuming it was a software problem. It worked great for weeks, until…another power interruption. I looked at my traffic logs and noticed no traffic to the remote station at all.

Perplexed, I scanned the forum messages until I noticed this post by Ray. I have installed microSD cards in both the OS devices, but I checked both OS devices anyway. Neither one of them had the microSD icon displayed on the LCD. So I rebooted the remote station, and made sure it had the microSD icon displayed.

I then did a short test to make sure I could reproduce the problem before rebooting the master, which I was able to reproduce.

The problem is that the OpenSprinkler app still displays the remote stations as operational, and you can set up times for those stations to water. It won’t work of course. Somehow the presence/absence of the microSD icon needs to be surfaced to the app to at least mark those remote stations as working/broken somehow. That would be very nice to know, since the fix (rebooting OS) isn’t very hard, but discovering why it’s happening is.

[Ray]

Hi,

I am curious about the ‘short test’ you did: could you explain how it’s done? Normally if the controller loses power and restarts it will re-initialize SD card and detect the presence of SD card. This check is done only at the beginning when the firmware restarts, and is not done repeatedly while the controller is running. So I wonder if there is something specially with the duration of the power break that causes it to fail to detect the SD card.

The SD card status is indicated internally by the ‘has_sd’ variable. I don’t think it’s exposed to the web API, but this can be easily added. However, the key issue, I think, is the question above, because it shouldn’t lose SD card status in the first place.

[Leo]

Here’s the OS setup I had for the “short test”. Both OS units are connected to TP-LINK TL-WR702N for Wi-Fi and Tripp Lite TLP606 power strips for power (both were recommended for OS, IIRC). I had rebooted the remote station OS so that I had both the remote station icon, SD icon, and network connectivity icons displayed. The master OS was still in the state where the SD icon was not displayed, but I had network connectivity.

I then used the OS app on my phone (over Wi-Fi) to attempt to run one of the zones controlled by the remote station for a short duration (15 seconds or so), which normally would have been enough time to actually see the sprinklers start up and water. They didn’t water (which was explained by Ray’s aforementioned post). I then (from the same physical location where I have good reception for the master’s Wi-Fi) started a zone controlled by the master for a similar length of time and those sprinklers watered. This replicated the problem I had the previous time with the remote station not watering. I then rebooted the master and repeated the test. This time both the remote station and the master zones watered.

The power sag/interruption wasn’t very long, maybe 2-3 brief sags over the course of maybe 5-10 seconds. I don’t remember how it was the first time I had this problem.

[Author]

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