Comfort in Meltdown!

[slychiu]

The Leap year problem was reported and fixed in ETH03 2.02, see http://www.comfortforums.com/forum113/4379.html

We will check the text problem, can you send the entire bus monitor log to support@cytech.biz

The keypad text is stored in its nnvolatile memory

When the keypad detects that its text is different from Comfort the keypad will automatically request the text from Comfort
Older keypad firmware will sjhow Press *1 and wait for user interventuion

The Text data not found message is when the text from comfort is invalid. This normally happens when the voice is lost\\

It is very strange that resetting the comfort fixes the text problem temporariliy

[Pgordon]

Thanks Chiu, good to hear one of the problems is known & fixed :-)

I\'ll send the entire monitor log shortly... I\'ll have to either zip it up or break it up... It\'s 12MB!

I\'m going to proceed today with removing the most recently added keypad and see if that has any effect on behaviour. Let me know if there\'s anything else you need me to do to help diagnose... I stand ready to assist however necessary, as I really want to get to the bottom this.

Many thanks

Paul G

[Pgordon]

One question... I think it\'s a long shot, but you never know... Is there any possibility of comfort being affected in this way by cold temperature?. Slave 2 is in the loft, mounted near the gable, adjacent to an air vent, so is effectively in an environment which is pretty close to the outside temperature... Which here in Norway in winter is currently around -10 to -13 Celcius...

[slychiu]

Most electronic components are rated from 0 to 70 deg  C so such cold temperatures may have  an effect.  If the main Comfort is subjected to this temperature that may cause problems. Even for the slave, it may have abn effect on the RS485 communications 

[Vangelis]

As we are going through the elimination process to try and get to the bottom of these issues - Try pulling the mains feed for a few hours (so the system will run off battery) this will rule out the mains introducing noise into the system and causing gremlins

Have seen mains noise cause issues before

Vangelis

[slychiu]

We have analysed the Bus monitor log that you send. It is a very large log recorded over 2 days, which has been very helpful.

We can see the problem occuring on some 4 or 5  occasions over the 2 days after the keypads have been reset on the hour. Only 1 keypad is affected  at a time due to a wrong reply to  the vocab info from Comfort. The strange thing is that the correct reply is given to 2 keypads but the wrong reply is given to one of the keypads. It appears that Comfort finds an invalid value in the vocab info temporarily, (for a fraction of a second)


This problem is exarcebated by resetting the keypads every hour because that is when the keypads request the vocab  info

The possibilities are;

1. There is a firmware bug in Comfort which is appearing in your system due to certain unknown conditions
2. There is some fault in the DSP module of Comfort
3. Environmental conditions are causing the problem eg extreme cold , power supply etc

We will do the same resetting of the keypads every hour and see if we can duplicxate it. If we can confirm if it is due to a hardware problem we will send a replacement DSP board to replace the one you have


Perhaps you can try to make it warmer for the Comfort so see if this is a cause?

[Pgordon]

Thanks Chiu.

I\'m sure I can do something to stabilise the temperature at the slave 2 panel... At the moment, because I\'ve recently been working on it (Keypad 3 is wired from there), I think the lid is still off... I\'ll replace the cover, and see if I can measure the temperature there...

Perhaps not helpful if this is realistically a factor in this behaviour... - the ambient outside temperature has now climbed to a \'balmy\' -1.5C Although a week from now the forecast is to drop again to -15C. The interior temperature inside the loft where the panel is fitted will always be at least a few degrees above the outside, so it\'s probably above zero up there at the moment.

Also, I can experiment with removing the reset KP1 from the hourly response, but you may remember that was put in there because of an intermittent problem with the LCD going completely blank on that keypad... I don\'t have that issue with the other 2 keypads, hence I don\'t reset those.. If we could get to the bottom of the issue of KP1 losing it\'s LCD display, then I could dispense with that frequent reset...

Looking forward to hearing what your testing indicates.

Paul G.

 

[slychiu]

The good news is that we have managed to duplicate the problem by resetting the keypads every 10 minutes.

So this is not an environmental issue. It is due to the  misbehaviour of the DSP when it has been queried for the vocabulary info too soon after the last query

We are testing a fix for this

[Pgordon]

Great news!

Might the same DSP problem also have had a bearing on the original behaviour I observed with my kp06 where every few hours the lcd would go completely blank until the kp was reset?

Paul G.

[slychiu]

ULT 7.094 will fix this issue. Please download from https://www.cytech.biz/product_details.php?item_id=210 and upgrade your Comfort.

Please check if the KP06 LCD issue is related. If it still hapens we wil arrange a replacement