esp32Thing crashes.

Wireless & IoT
1

During my application development the esp32 Thing would crash.

I was powering it from the USB port on my computer. I thought is was a power brownout problem so I built a battery powered regulated 5.0v supply with and lm317 which could easily deliver 1amp. Things seemed to work better, didn’t concern myself with the occasional crash during development.

My code is a data logger which sends 25 bytes of data over the wifi every 5 seconds and needs to run for days. I could get the board to run for a few hours but it would always eventually crash. The crashing is now more frequent, I am lucky to keep it running for 30 seconds now. Most of the time now as soon as I ask my PC to connect to the WIFI network it immediately crashes. The board seems to have degraded an now hardly runs. I have ordered a new board and hope it works.

I have used both client and AP server mode. I am now in AP server mode. I am using the blue led as a mode light to show me what part of my code is executing. When it crashes the led goes to a very dim continuous on state. I Have a debug version of the code which I can run with the serial monitor when connected via USB. It has the same behavior and when it crashes there is no diagnostic displayed.

Has anyone else had this problem?

2

Today 8/27 tried new board. This is how a printed circuit installation with a robust power supply (5.13V).

It ran for one hour and 13 minutes before it hung. Frustrating.

3

the ESP32 is working on 3V3. Are you providing 5V on the battery connection or the USB?

4

I am providing 5V to pin 2 on the header which is VUSB-RAW.

I was using the spark fun real time clock module BOB-12708 which uses the DS1307. I do have a logic level converter.

Software communication used wifi.h I rewrote my application and removed the dependence on the RTC. I took out wifi.h

Now my application works without crashing. I have however not had time to run it for more than a few hours. I hope

to do more extensive testing later this fall.

5

The wifi part of the second board is now defunct. The esp32Thing executes code, it doesn’t crash but I can no longer connect to the WIFI.

It had been working just fine. I was debugging other circuits on the board so I was ignoring this board for a few weeks, it just sat there waiting

for somebody to connect. I recently tried to connect from my PC, it tries and tries, connects for a few seconds and then disconnects.

6

can you share the code you are using? An ESP32 (like the ESP8266) needs to be perform regular background tasks for onboard WIFI and BLE. If you have a waiting loop, you have to include yield() on a regular basis to prevent the watchdog to timeout and cause a crash. Also you remember the kind of messages you got when crashing ?

regards,

paul