TTN GATEWAY central 2

also meins geht :wink:
https://ttnmapper.org/colour-radar/?gateway=ttn01&type=radar

Thanks kersing, I will give it a go later.

Hi Everyone

We have updates from the last few days with regards to the number of gateways with the reboot and seemingly DOA issue. With this message, we wanted to tell you about the current status and the next steps involved. Since the starting of this year, we have distributed over 1000 gateways around the world. Some of the people receiving these gateways ran into a reboot issue where the device restarts after a certain interval of time. Our team over the past few weeks has been working hard on finding the root cause of this issue. We want to assure people who are facing this issue to know that we are on top of this and ask for their patience as we address this properly.

Your help and feedback is really valuable. It would be great if people facing the reboot issue (including DOA gateways) can report this on Github. If you are technically experienced and want to help us by testing the beta firmware please find the instructions in this github comment. There are two ways of doing this - first is for people who have access to a programmer while the second is for people who have a spare SD card to flash the firmware. Please note that this is only recommended for people who are well versed with the hardware side of things. Many thanks to @kersing, @cyberjunky, @arjanvanb for already helping us with testing this firmware. The more feedback we have, the faster we can consolidate and fix the problem.

Also from now on, we will be posting weekly updates here on this thread so make sure to keep an eye out. Even if there is little or no progress we will let you all know. We noticed that being active here on this channel is valuable and helpful to a lot of members.


The Things Products Team

14 Likes

Anyone in the Groningen NL region with a gateway with issues that wants to have the new firmware flashed, drop me a personal message and we’ll arrange something.

Installed a beta firmware which dates from yesterday (March 13th) and it works just great. No more reboots. Running smooth and stable for >10h. Finally a working gateway which has been catching dust on my desk since December.

1 Like

While we’re doing further testing of the patch that should fix the remainder of problems with the LoRa Module communication, we pushed a v1.0.2 firmware to both the beta and stable release channels. This version includes the patches that have been tested in beta for some time now, as well as a patch that fixed a potential crash when receiving downlink messages. If you have automatic updates enabled, your gateway will be updated within 24 hours. If you want the update now, all you have to do is unplug the gateway and plug it in again. You can also update the firmware by SD card, see here for instructions and download links.

These releases also come with hex files that include an updated bootloader which fixes the incorrect clock settings that made communication between the microcontroller and the LoRa module unstable. Links to those hex files (firmware-with-bootloader.hex) are under the Firmware with bootloader section of the firmware README file. Note that these files must be installed using a programmer; this method should be used by experts only. Maybe someone in your community or close to you has a programmer and can also do this for you.

Please submit any feedback or new issues on Github and if you have the chance, please help us test the next patch for making the communication between the microcontroller and the LoRa module more stable.


The Things Products Team

2 Likes

Automatic upgrade went fine …

2018-03-15 12:41:28.987425 FIRM: New firmware found, start downloading!
2018-03-15 12:41:28.987750 FIRM: (OLD key) 69 AE B7 78 1F 49 4E 7F BC B6 C7 CD 9C 59 4F 5D FA AA 3D 81 D4 9C 56 90 A6 83 81 98 FF 18 88 6A 
2018-03-15 12:41:28.988385 FIRM: (NEW key) A7 76 2E BD 2A FB 65 23 CC A5 FE A3 2E CE 17 98 BE 56 A0 36 E5 8D C3 ED 35 C9 0E 63 52 0C D8 22 
2018-03-15 12:41:28.988577 FIRM: Requesting firmware ...
2018-03-15 12:41:29.782301 FIRM: Starting download
2018-03-15 12:41:29.782337 FIRM: available bytes: 583
2018-03-15 12:43:36.105806 FIRM: Finishing writing to storage
2018-03-15 12:43:36.153619 MAIN: NEW FIRMWARE, REBOO
2018-03-15 12:45:25.490311 FIRM: Requesting key ...
2018-03-15 12:45:28.408618 FIRM: Starting download
2018-03-15 12:45:28.408621 FIRM: available bytes: 79
2018-03-15 12:45:28.408912 FIRM: (Downloaded FOTA key) A7 76 2E BD 2A FB 65 23 CC A5 FE A3 2E CE 17 98 BE 56 A0 36 E5 8D C3 ED 35 C9 0E 63 52 0C D8 22 
2018-03-15 12:45:28.409769 FIRM: (Stored FOTA key) A7 76 2E BD 2A FB 65 23 CC A5 FE A3 2E CE 17 98 BE 56 A0 36 E5 8D C3 ED 35 C9 0E 63 52 0C D8 22 
2018-03-15 12:45:28.409978 FIRM: Firmware is already downloaded

43

I did a power cycle to initiate firmware download:

Start:

Version Info
Hardware: v1
Bootloader: r1-7167873a (2017-06-02T13:48:18Z)
Firmware: v1.0.0-917719b9 (2017-06-26T17:59:33Z)

14:26, Power cycle
First led blinks slowly, no change to other state.

14:29
blinking led 1,3,5 stable 2,4

14:30
Normal boot sequence

14:31 back on line

Version Info
Hardware: v1
Bootloader: r1-7167873a (2017-06-02T13:48:18Z)
Firmware: v1.0.2-475aef56 (2018-03-15T10:16:13Z)

For confirmation: The only way to update the bootloader is by using a programmer?

Yep, that’s in protected memory, so can’t be changed by the regular firmware update method.

@htdvisser If it is beneficial to the gateway to update the bootloader it is time to organize a meetup for this task.

We do believe that the new bootloader improves the stability of the gateway, but we don’t have enough data yet to prove any significant improvements. If you can help test it, that would be great!

We do know that the new bootloader can (together with the new firmware) help solve the reboot loop for some gateways that (used to) have this issue, so it definitely won’t hurt to offer your programming skills to unfortunate people in your community with a rebooting gateway.

Apart from that, it’s of course always a good time to organize meetups :+1:

Just some feedback re a previously working gateway with auto update set to yes (not beta) being updated fine.

My TTN gateway has been off for the last 3 days. I just switched it on and noticed that the LEDs did something different during bootup - The odd and even LEDS were “dancing” back and forth.
I waited until they became static and sure enough, the status page now shows there has been an update to the latest version (v1.0.2-475aef56)

All OK here - nice work
(bootloader version is still original)

Yesterday i copied version
Bootloader: r1-7167873a (2017-06-02T13:48:18Z)
Firmware: v1.0.1-91648b7e (2018-03-13T16:48:17Z)
on a SD card, but this version stay connected but after 5 minutes it stops with receiving messages.

Now i will try the new version
Bootloader: r1-7167873a (2017-06-02T13:48:18Z)
Firmware: v1.0.2-475aef56 (2018-03-15T10:16:13Z)

updated here also to Firmware v1.0.2-475aef56 (2018-03-15T10:16:13Z) auto update and it seems to work fine for the last 5 hours.

now how to update the bootloader… I have a pickit 3 that’s working with MPLAB IPE v3.26

IPE-TTN%20GW%2002

so far no difference in operation, have had 3 reboots since I upgraded the firmware.

GW%20close%20up

1 Like

Update looked promising, all LED’s up. But after a short while the reboot cycle started again. Firmware was updated to 1.02

Maybe i was too early with my comments. After another reboot the gateway is online. The console shows it is receiving messages, too. Unpacked the Node again and receiving data.

Great breakthrough, now hoping for gateway stability.

Version 1.02 also reboots.

Could you be a bit more specific? Which version exactly? v1.0.2-475aef56 fixes a number of problems, but not all. If you still experience reboots, it would be very helpful if you could test the patch that @TTP mentioned above (unfortunately that one may also mention version 1.0.2, so please include the commit hash if you mention the version number). Also, if you have the possibility of reading logs from the gateway, that would be very helpful.

We’re trying to collect all feedback on Github so that everything is on one place and the @TTP team can focus on fixing things instead of spending their time looking for clues on the forum, email or even Twitter. So please use Github for any further feedback on the firmware updates.