Is my card loosing connection or rebooting

1

I have been testing my project: a pico card connected to a note carrier. I have seen the following messages from time to time. Last night I ran the pico process from about 9pm to 9am this morning and the following messages were in the notehub around 6:30am this morning. What are these messages exactly?

_session.qo {“why”:“first sync; power-outage.qo requested sync; continuous connection mode; periodic inbound sync due (TLS)”}

_health.qo {“text”:“boot (brown-out & hard reset [15128] [3.0] G:P:W~ M:P:W900 U:W~ R:P:W~ S:Pping:ping:XR5 T I:HN:get notification:XR5)”}

_env.dbs _state_vars_net{"net{“iccid”:“89011704278852101247”,“imsi”:“310170885210124”,“modem”:“EG91NAXGAR07A03M1G_01.003.01.003”},“net_updated”:1666261908}

2

Hi @rksteeves,

_session.qo is an event that is created on Notehub at the start of each session. In this case the “why” is telling you that it’s the first sync, the Notecard is in continuous mode, etc.

_health.qo is another event created on Notehub that contains information about the health of the Notecard. It looks like this Notecard was restarted or lost power which is what likely triggered the new session.

_env.dbs is a .dbs (secure database) file that is bidirectionally synced with Notehub and contains environment variables like _state_vars_net which contains some basic identifiers about the Notecard’s SIM and modem.

Hope that helps!

Rob

3

This is helpful information.

I have moved from doing testing while the pico was connected to my laptop (at which time I never saw this) to testing the pico and notecard in standalone fashion, I am not clear on why the card restarted. The pico is connected through usb power plug and the card carrier is connected to the pico. I have a status check that runs every hour and returns
“body”: {
“temperature”: 22,
“voltage”: 3.1386719
},

the voltage seems to vary ony by 0.0x in all of the requests, so I am unclear as to why the card would restart. I am preparing to run the card remotely, so I am trying to understand this issue better.

4

Hi @rksteeves,

I should clarify: restarting the Notecard (e.g. with a card.restore or card.restart request) would also cause that “hard reset” message to appear.

Rob

5

Hmm, I am pretty sure I am not sending those commands

6

Well this turns out to be a larger problem.

Although the status messages sent out from the notecard carried on after the restart, the pico is not longer aware of incoming messages. I am using the ATTN pin and using an interrupt to handle incoming messages. As it turns out with the notecard restarting, the connection between the interrupt handler and the ATTN pin is lost and the pico does not see incoming messages.

Any suggestions?

7

Can you post a picture of your hardware? There might be an issue we can help identify. The Notecard should never, ever, restart unless it’s explicitly told to or it loses power.

Thanks,
Rob

8

note
note1224×1632 239 KB

9

Thanks @rksteeves,

We have some suggestions based on this photo:

  1. Plug the red wire into the V+ socket immediately next to GND on the Notecarrier (not VUSB). VUSB is intended to get 5V while V+ has a diode with a lower forward voltage drop and is designed for 2.5v - 5.5v.
  2. Make sure that the 1V8/3V3 switch on the Notecarrier is set to 3V3, unless you are actually using 1V8 logic.
  3. Can you clarify what is connected to the RED/BLACK wires as your power supply? 3.1v is at the low end of a LiPo’s power, and at 2.8v a LiPo will get damaged. If you are at the low end of LiPo power, it could very well be that the host MCU is occasionally drawing enough that the Notecard dips below its 2.5V minimum and reboots.

Thanks,
Rob

10

The power (red/black) is coming from a pico board (which is labeled as 3.3v. Would I be better off powering the notecarrier directly through the usb with a 5v power supply?

I will make the changes suggested and see what happens

11

Looking at the Pico datasheet it looks like the max load on the 3V3 pin is 300mA, less than the 2A pulse that the Notecard can require. I would power the Notecarrier directly, yes.

Rob

12

I had the pico and notecard running since yesterday with the changes you suggested yesterday and it has been running since then without failure. However, I will look into getting power to directly power the notecarrier rather than from the pico.

Thanks for all of your help, you guys do a great job!

randy