The power pins (21, 22) have to be connected to a power source that is able to provide more than 700 mA. Therefore it is recommended to choose a proper power supply that is able to supply the iC880A-SPI and the host system (e.g. Raspberry PI) at the same time.
Check your power cables, ESPECIALLY if youāre using USB cables. Most of them are crap and will drop voltage like thereās no tomorrow under load because they are barely rated for 500mA. Just in case, use different cables for the two boards, or make your own sturdy cable and supply the RPi directly through the 5V pin on the header (be careful, it bypasses the polyfuse).
If said load is a current inrush (for example, when you are resetting the iC880A) the voltage drop might not even be visible on a multimeter, so if you have an oscilloscope at hand you should use that with a falling trigger at 4.5V or something.
Has an on-board 5.1V 3A voltage regulator which I was powering from a 12V 20A psu over POE so Iām confident that the gateway has more than enough ājuiceā for its needs.
I switched the gateway off for 30 mins - when I powered it on, it started up straight away -
I will have to keep my eye on it - I donāt like not knowing what caused the failure in the first place.
I have the same board. one thing I noticed is that the small potentiometer is hard to adjustā¦ and it is suggested that we make it permanent by putting a drop of silicon on it. Did you check the voltage while your ic880a wasnāt starting up? I didnātā¦ but I will be doing that if and when the problem surfaces again. Building 5 gateways in total and we need this stable before we put it out in the fieldā¦
Yes - I have a voltmeter connected to the 5V output on the backplane and it shows 5.1V.
The gateway still fails to start after a re-boot. I have to do the power off - wait - power on procedure each time. I donāt understand why the ic880a doesnāt respond to the RESET signal as it should.
Hi, I made those interface boards. A while ago I received a batch of pin headers (the 20x2 type) that seemed to make bad contact when stacked. I noticed it while testing the boards (I test every assembled board manually before shipping) and tried to replace all pin headers with good ones, but maybe some still slipped through. (I threw them all in the thrash now, to be safe ) .
You say that the same issue happens if you wire up the iC880A board with jumper wires. In that case this should not be the cause, but maybe it was just a coincidence?
Could you use this test script to turn on all LEDs and then wiggle around the board slightly to see if some of them turn on/off? If you have good connection between the pin headers, the LEDs should never flicker.
I tried your script and all the leds work fine and so does the button. Its difficult to āwiggleā the backplane as its screwed down tight on standffs.
I have pin 22 (RESET) jumpered to the blue led so I know when the RESET pulse is sent but the ic880a doesnāt react to it at all.
I donāt think its a backplane or a hardware issue as exactly the same thing happens with my ātestā gateway which is just an RPi3B jumpered to an ic880a. When I re-boot, the ic880a fails to respond to the RESET signal and the gateway doesnāt start.
I have two batches of ic880s and so far it only did that on one (OLDER batch)ā¦ the other (belonging to a different/newer batch) is still aliveā¦ waiting for it to (knock on wood) āmisbehaveā. the one that āmisbehavedā before had # 0488 on the small square label and # 003609 on the large label ~13.2mm x 11.2mm. the NEWER batch that is still working have # 0038 on the small label and # 003892 on another, the label being ~13.2mm x 7.0mm. Iāll do some more tests (run the gateways in parallel to see if behavior is different for each one).
Iāve set the DEBOG_HAL to 1 and all I get is - 31.07.17 21:53:10 (+0000) ERROR: FAIL TO CONNECT BOARD
I donāt know how to do the last 2 steps - start the tool and log the output and āplayā a little bit with this tool while logging the output. I canāt find these 2 directories in my resin build. Maybe they are not there and I need to adjust my /dev/build.sh file to get them complied - I donāt know.
The white labels on the board are Batch and Serial numbers.
Mine is 0350 and 003959 on one
and (canāt see it) and 003506 on the other.
I was asked for these when I opened a ticket.
In your log there is a pin 22 mentioned (physical pin), instead of 25 (gpio number of pin 22):
This is a part of the Resin.io log -
31.07.17 22:49:09 (+0000) [TTN Gateway]: Resetting concentrator on pin 22
31.07.17 22:49:10 (+0000) *** Multi Protocol Packet Forwarder for Lora Gateway ***
So I presumed that was the same configuration typo as I had, I changed in my configfile reset-pin 22 in reset-pin 25 and it worked like a charm