Hi
We have a board comprising of an Electron and some other components. The one component requires a cycle of power when it gets into a lock up state. Long term we need to address why this component is locking up.
We have many devices in the field and for now we have to manually disconnect the battery and then reconnect.
Is there any way a reset can be performed remotely which causes a drop in the 3V3 voltage. The System.reset() does not cause an interruption to the 3V3 line. Or is this a pipe dream…
It’s not possible to interrupt the 3V3 line on the Electron. One solution to this is to power your sensors using a MOSFET controlled by a GPIO line so you can power them down. This is more common to preserve battery power, but also can be helpful for resetting devices.
It’s actually possible on the Boron by using an external circuit to control the EN line. There’s an example of powering down the Boron for 30 seconds remotely here: Deep Reset Tutorial .
For battery powered Electrons you can power down 3V3 by disabling the BATFET. However, there is no way to turn it back on without connecting the Electron to USB or VIN power, so presumably that won’t be helpful.
Hi Rikkas
This is very helpful. We have a way to disable the power to the Electron through a pin attached to the Electron. It is a transistor which is always on and when we apply power via a pin we take the power to the board down. With a cap it takes about 1 second for the board to get power again.
The issue was that the battery continued to power the Electron. Your suggestion of using BATFET works well.
If anyone else reads this in the future, the code is as follows
PMIC pmic;
pmic.disableBATFET();
1 Like