SARA-R5 Starter Kit | Unable to communicate with the SARA

Development Boards MicroMod
1

Hi,

I’ve purchased the SARA-R5 starter kit and I’m hitting a roadblock.

When the Asset Tracker Update Tool board is mounted on the carrier, I can successfully send AT commands to the SARA board.

However when I mount the Micromod ESP32 and try to run the examples from the GitHub repo Micromod_Asset_Tracker, it always fails to connect to the SARA.

With debug:

init: Begin module init.
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: E0
init: Module failed echo test.
init: Begin module init.
init: Attempting autobaud connection to module.
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: +IPR=9600
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: 
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: +IPR=9600
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: 
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: +IPR=9600
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: 
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: +IPR=9600
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: 
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: +IPR=9600
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: 
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: +IPR=9600
sendCommandWithResponse: Command: 
init: Begin module init.
init: Power cycling module.
powerOff: complete
powerOn: complete
init: Module failed to init. Exiting.
Unable to communicate with the SARA.
Manually power-on (hold the SARA On button for 3 seconds) on and try again.

and so on…

And to be clear the SARA is turned on.

Am I doing anything wrong?

I tried everything and I’m not sure what else to do to be to communicate with the SARA from the ESP32.

Help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Alex

2

After more testing, I still cannot achieve a successful initialisation of the SARA using the ESP32 MicroMod. It is really blocking my progress for an IoT project and deadlines are approaching quickly… Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance,

Alex

3

Hi, have you got any solution yet?

4

Hi,

I am using the SARA AWS ExpressLink, this module has quite a long initialisation time (about 15 seconds). Once initialised it sends a Welcome message on the serial. Only then can you start sending AT commands…

The GitHub examples from Sparkfun were not taking into account this initialisation delay, and so it would just fail over and over.

To debug it, I just coded a basic serial passthrough, to be able to communicate directly from my terminal to the SARA module.

I hope that helps if you’re having the same issue

Cheers

5

Hi Alex,

Just adding a link to the GitHub issue - just in case anyone else has the same issue.

https://github.com/sparkfun/MicroMod_As … r/issues/7

So, just to be clear, do the Asset Tracker examples work OK on the SARA AWS ExpressLink - if you add the 15 second start-up delay?

Very best wishes,

Paul