Photon reading RSSI value of 2

I have about 50 photons that check in with a server every 3 seconds or so. When they do, they transmit the current RSSI value. I’ve had these things running for a couple years and sending their temperature, heat set points etc. Recently, and I don’t know how recently, some of them show ‘2’ as the value for RSSI, but it’s not every time they check in, it’s just sometimes. I haven’t poked around to see if this started at a certain FW but if anyone else is seeing this, let me know if you have found a way to fix it.

For now, I’m just putting the following in the server check-in (PHP) script to prevent it from screwing up my dashboard:

if($rssi < 1){
//update MYSQL table with all the received values including the RSSI
}else{
//update the MYSQL table with all the values you received from the photon, except for the RSSI because it’s a positive number (probably the number 2) and is invalid.
}

Also I realized that this thread sounds like I’m complaining. I’m not. The photons have saved me thousands in gas bills and hundreds of hours (maybe thousands of hours also by now)

Whav device OS version are you running?

I’d check for $rssi < 0 for negative values :wink:

Ah! Yes, I meant 0. But since I’ve never seen any other positive number as of yet, other than 2, that fix did the trick.

These are FW 1.0.0.

I can update them and see if it changes anything but I don’t like to do updates unless I’m on site because once in a great while one of them will hang during the update - I’m guessing it’s because they are using the external antenna operationally, but perhaps the update process uses the internal antenna and they are too far from the nearest AP… they’re spread out over 5 acres and there’s a lot of variation in signal quality.

I also have another 20 or so of them running newer firmware that I deployed over the summer for irrigation, I can take a look at those, but I’ll have to undo my fix first in order to see whether they’re sending 2s.

Since device OS 1.2.1 I have found the update process really rock solid. The stability of the WiFi connection whilst updating is important. Updating devices with OS 0.8.0-RC.x is a slightly different matter and I have found a few have needed a prod (remote reset command). Not sure whether you do this but it is a good idea to do the following:

  1. Listen for update and reset events and ensure that the application is not in the middle of something when the post flash reset happens.
  2. If you use EEPROM have a magic version number to ensure any settings that need to be are and any previous stored value that need to be are recovered after startup following flash.

Regards the RSSI values;
2 = timeout error (in my experience this pops up very occasionally)
1 = WiFi IC error (this is even rarer - can happen if commands send to WiFi module IC without enough time for the command to be carried out e.g. WiFi.off() then WiFi.on() and WiFi.connect())

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