Dropping counts

Oh no, I thought you had this all sorted   

I'm assuming you have the GK-B5 and the GK-Wifi board. Do you have the OLED screen for the GK-Wifi? If so does that still show the counts? From what I understand the GK-B5 is a counter with ATmega328p and this sends the CPM via UART to the GK-Wifi board. There are several points that I would check to see where it is failing. The first thing I would do is either enable or add code to debug the GK-Wifi. I would be looking at the serial coming in and the function to send the data to radmon. I'd also be keeping a close eye on the wifi connection - in some of my earlier versions of code I developed for the ESP8266 (various projects) the wifi would silently stop working. A reset or power cycle would sort this for x hours or days. It will be a bit or a chore to edit the code and test as I think the GK-Wifi can only be programmed when disconnected from the GK-B5. This will also be a pain to monitor the serial output for debugging and would possibly require breaking out the TX from the GK-Wifi and connecting to a PC via RS232/TTL adapter. A relatively easy way of checking if the wifi has dropped is to ping the ESP8266. Wait until it stops reporting to radmon and then ping the GK-Wifi. Other things I would try are to update all of the arduino libraries and boards and recompile the code. I'm assuming you have the latest firmware from the GK site? If not, then updating to the latest would also be something to try.

I think in order to get to the bottom of the issue it is going to require debugging to see just which part the fault lies with. Do you have the oled screen for the GK-Wifi? If so, does that show anything when it drops out?

FSM19 wrote:

I don't have the wifi module its the older GKNet. 

My apologies, I know you mentioned GK-Net but I struggle to find much info about that counter so I had (wrongly) assumed it to be the add-on WiFi board.

Good to hear you are having some success with the ESP8266. I'm am particularly fond of that device as a counter. I have two running on ESP8266. One on a new NetIO GC-10next that I am testing/playing with and one (that came with) the GK-Radmon. I didn't quite like the original firmware for the GK-Radmon (BroHogan's) as it was very much geared towards low power usage and I wanted  the counter counting all the time so I wrote my own and that has been running very well since I ironed out the bugs. It may be worth running the ESP8266 at 80MHz instead of 160MHz as it will use less power, run cooler, extend longevity and I have read reports of WiFi dropping out when run at 160MHz, although I have experienced WiFi dropouts at both frequencies. I always use a piece of code now in the loop so when the WiFi does drop, it automatically tries to reconnect, and will keep trying forever. It is very useful for when access points are rebooted and such.