Almost all sensors showing low-battery after update to 4.9m

[gcams]

I'm running the new model RFXCOM RFXtrx433 with meteohub and I've just updated to v4.9m. However after the upgrade, almost all of my sensors are showing the low battery warning (ignore the PCR800 sensor being offline.. I'm not using it at present). I know the sensor batteries are fine, looking at the actual weather station console (plus most sensors have batteries less than a month old in any case):



Any thoughts most appreciated!

Cheers,
Graham

[skyewright]

I'm running the new model RFXCOM RFXtrx433 with meteohub and I've just updated to v4.9m. However after the upgrade, almost all of my sensors are showing the low battery warning (ignore the PCR800 sensor being offline.. I'm not using it at present). I know the sensor batteries are fine, looking at the actual weather station console (plus most sensors have batteries less than a month old in any case):

I'm not using v4.9m and I using the old model RFXCOM. Overthe last few years I have found the OS sensor low battery warnings to be less than perfect...

Having replaced batteries several times in sensors when they didn't seem to be very old I decided to try an experiment. As a result one of my sensors has been reporting "low battery" for the best part of a year now. It's still working fine, and the sensor's LCD still does not show a low battery symbol itself.

I'm sure that doesn't help directly, but maybe it indicates that if there is a fixable problem at the root of this then it might not be something specific to that hardware & software combination?

[gcams]

Thanks for your thoughts and experiences skyewright. I too have experienced short-comings in the low battery warnings, especially on the OS V2.0 sensors (not sure if the V3.0 ones are any better).

However I suspect what I'm seeing is a retrogression bug introduced from the changes made in the code between 4.9l and 4.9m, which specifically addressed changes to the new RFXtrx433 data-retreival code. I did some work with Boris on V4.9l, as I had a similar issue with fictitious low batt. warnings showing on both my Anemometers over in this thread.

Given all these battery-low warnings popped-up immediately after the reboot into version 4.9m, I can't help but think it's a similar bug to the one Boris addressed in 4.9l and has maybe been re-introduced in the code changes to 4.9m.

[skyewright]

Given all these battery-low warnings popped-up immediately after the reboot into version 4.9m, I can't help but think it's a similar bug to the one Boris addressed in 4.9l and has maybe been re-introduced in the code changes to 4.9m.

Reading through that I agree that a re-introduction looks like a distinct possibility. Certainly something to double check on.

[admin]

could you please post a screen dump of "sensors" page?
This will help me to understand what type of sensors are impacted.

[gcams]

Thanks Boris, screen shots follow below.

The weird thing is that randomly, the sensors with low batt change.. there seems to be no pattern to it. For example, the below screenshot shows sensors with low batt warning:



Then after a refresh a minute later the sensors with low-batt has changed again:



It seems to change quite randomly on each refresh. There seems to be no real pattern to it?

[admin]

Please make sure your rfxtrx is running the latest firmware. rfxcom is still heavily developing on that and the position of the lowbat flags did change a bit in the past.

[gcams]

Thanks for the reply Boris. I upgraded my RFXtrx433 this morning to the latest firmware on rfxcom.com (V4.8), however unfortunately the symptoms have not changed at all:



Interestingly, whilst I had the RFXcom connected to the laptop, I ran RFXmngr and watched the raw output from the RFXCom, of the Oregon sensors. This confirmed that the RFXcom was returning "Battery Status: OK" for the V3.0 sensors. So it would appear that the RFXcom, at least, is recognising the batteries as being OK in the sensors whilst outputting to RFXmngr. So perhaps there is still something amiss between the RFXtrx433 and Meteohub?

[gcams]

Boris, I was wondering if you had any further thoughts on the above low battery warning issue? As mentioned above, despite upgrading to the latest firmware version on the RFXCom RFXtrx433, I'm still getting random low battery warnings on most of my sensors. (They seem to come and go quite randomly). The actual hardware weather station consoles confirm that all sensor batteries are healthy.

[jmontamat]

MeteoHub: 5.0c (Build 61) and RFXTRX 433MHz firmware version: 23.2 is the same.

JM.

[Expalmi]

I got my RFXtrx433E, firmware 243, today and I have the same problem.

Is there any solotution on this problem?

[Expalmi]

I have checked the data the sensors are sending using the RFXmgr.

They are sending Battery = OK or Battery = 100% depending on the kind of sensor.

So why does meteohub show the battery symbol?

[rune]

Bump... Just replaced batteries in my Oregon WGR800 with brand new Lithium batteries. battery level from rfxmgr shows "battery = OK", but Meteohub shows half full. RFXtrx runs fw 9.2, meteohub 5.0o.

This error seems to have existed for a while, Boris could you please fix? As an added bonus, you could even throw in the RSSI value from RFXcom into the "sensors" page . Would make it easier to see if signal strength is well within range.

[Expalmi]

any new information?

The problem still exists.

[rune]

Nope. I have concluded that there's no maintenance in regards to RFXcom despite it being officially supported. I've chosen to accept the fact that I receive "low battery" warnings and I will not update the rfxtrx, since this might break the support even further.