Electron regularly disconnecting ~80% of the time

Troubleshooting
1

I have what I hope is a fairly simple problem to solve, though I haven’t been able to figure it out yet

I have an Electron up and running but its connection seems to fail more often than it succeeds. The electron has no problem connecting right after powering on, but then after a moderate amount of time it drops the connection for a while (blinking cyan usually, green occasionally), and then reconnects.

Left running since for the last 18 hours, set to report every minute, on the minute it has successfully reported 211 times, or 20% of the time (211/1080).

I have the Electron located in the same room as a raspberry pi with a Huawei e303 modem using the same SIM card to transmit the same data, and that is coming through 100%, so I don’t think it’s a signal issue.

The Electron is powered by a 5v 2A wall-wart through a board from NCD.IO, so I don’t think that we’re losing power.

The SIM card is an ATT card, rather than the Particle SIM.

Any thoughts on what might be going on and how to rectify it?

2

What system version?
What SYSTEM_MODE()?
Have you set Particle.keepAlive()? To what value? Are you usingSYSTEM_THREAD(ENABLED)`?
If not, may your code be blocking for extended times?
Could you be running into the publishing limit of 1/sec?

3

It would be good if you reported the cellular signal RSSI strength with each publish to help with troubleshooting between the 2 units.

4

All,

My apologies for the slow response from my end! I appreciate the help, I figured out the issue, but it turns out it was a hardware failure, not a software one. Combined with the NCD.io board, I think that there was insufficient power to keep the electron’s signal up. I don’t have hard proof of that, but powering the electron and board separately solves the problem.

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