I spoke with Sparkfun support and they initially figured the PHT sensor might be faulty, so they shipped me another one. I am still unable to get this thing to work so I was leaning towards the ESP32 itself being faulty or the cable, another back and forth with Sparkfun support and they realized that the sensor in question is a SparkX product and thus the code I was using may not be the correct one, and furthermore, because it’s a SparkX product I will need to do some moderate to light hacking to get it to work.
I bought into Sparkfun and Qwicc for what I believed was going to be as close to plug-n-play as possible with embedded electronics and programming. I realize now I purchased the wrong sensor, I am still determined to make this work, however in the future I think I will be avoiding sparkX products.
Can anyone shed any light on how I can get this thing working? There are plenty of details in my linked forum post that explained where I got to and nothing has changed since.
I’m sorry you are having problems with the MS8607. It is one of my favorite Qwiic boards. I have four of them and they all work perfectly with the ESP32 Thing Plus. One of my standard tests is to connect all four of them - using a Qwiic Mux - and to make sure I can read data from all four.
There are three parts to your system: ESP32 Thing Plus; Qwiic MS8607; and the Qwiic cable.
With the ESP32 Thing Plus, the most important thing is to select the correct board in the Arduino IDE. Please check once again that you have “SparkFun ESP32 Thing Plus” selected as the board type. If you select a different board, it may not work because the pin definitions for the I2C (Qwiic) pins may be completely different.
The MS8607 is a very simple board. It is tested by a SparkX engineer after manufacture. It is unlikely to be faulty. And you say it has been replaced once already? Having two faulty boards is extremely unlikely.
Have you checked your Qwiic cable? Do you have a second cable you could test? Your cable is one of the longest ones. Do you have a shorter cable you can test? You say the LED is lighting up on the MS8607 board, so you know 3.3V and GND are connected. But maybe there is a break in the I2C SCL or SDA wires (yellow and blue)? Do you have a multimeter which you could use to check the continuity?
Do you have a different Qwiic sensor board you can test? If you connect that to your ESP32, does it work correctly with its code examples? This would help to work out where the problem is.
Thanks for the response guys! For some reason I never got a notification of your responses. I will do w/e you guys suggest.
Unfortunately I do not have any spare parts around, I was really hoping to grab these three components and basically instantly have something I could show to my boss as tech demo. They are now on the fence about ordering more sparkfun products at the moment, I may have to purchase them myself.
Turns out it was a faulty qwiic cable. I ordered a bunch of smaller ones from Amazon. The first one I tried instantly started working. So much frustration and wasted time all due to a faulty qwiic cable, it’s either faulty or perhaps it’s too long (45cm?) .
Anyhow, super duper happy it’s working as I initially presumed it would. On to hacking!
