RFX dying???

Sun May 2 20:35:30 EDT 2021

I was at the ranch today and found that the XBees went offline again this week. The xbee.isf showed up in Activity Monitor and looked to be running normally. I toggled it off in XTension’s interfaces window and it disappeared from Activity Monitor as expected.

However, when I tried to toggle the XBee interface back on, XTension couldn't open the serial port. I didn’t have debug mode on when I took the photo below, but I later turned it on and it didn’t show me anything else. Restarting the machine solved the problem.

> On Apr 4, 2021, at 9:02 AM, James Sentman <james at sentman.com> wrote:
> 
> OK thats interesting!
> 
> The xBee plugin is written in an older plugin format and is actually an executable under the hood where the newer RFX plugins are written to the newer API and use Python, the older RFX plugin use the most ancient of all plugin API’s so old that we didn’t even think of them as plugins but as input processors ;) The actual code that runs any of those has not changed in that many versions, I did update some of the python includes including the serial library at some point recently and fix a few bugs with the newest RFX in using the serial port at all. But those should be 3 separate systems with no overlap as far as a common failure point that I can think of yet this morning. Only one cup of coffee in so far though so it might come clear to me later…
> 
> Can you guys gather some info for me?
> 
> First please search your logs for errors or messages associated with the plugin. You can use the log’s filtering mechanism to block out everything else and just look for anything from the plugins. I know a lot of folks complain I log too much information some times but it’s for cases like this when something is going wrong so it will be there ;) I do not suppress logging of any errors unless it’s something that I am absolutely sure is meaningless and happens so often as to make the log harder to read for anything else. 
> 
> Are you running as a direct serial connection to the device? Or as an ethernet or Wiznet or other ethernet to serial adapted connection? Those use different blocks of code under the hood so there may be a problem with one that I haven’t seen in the other.
> 
> Then please run the interface in debug mode until the error happens and see if you get any other messages. I Think all those interfaces should be able to be run in debug mode without them writing thousands of log lines. Some of the interfaces that do polling can log an awful lot, but none of these are in that category.
> 
> When you say a restart do you mean of the entire machine or just XTension? If it’s just XTension then it might be a plugin that is stuck holding the port open so that nothing else can get to it. You can check for this by disabling the interface in XTension and then using the activity monitor to look for the associated plugin process. For the xBee driver is is called xbee.isf and the RFX plugins all have at least the letters “rfx” in them so you can search for them that way. There should be none when no interface of that type is running and if they stick around when the interface is disabled then that is something I can most likely fix. If it’s a restart of the whole machine then thats weirder and might be more difficult to track down since I’m not supposed to be able to do anything that can muss up system resources that badly. Also there is just no way I can imagine that an interface would startup if the port was already in use somewhere else. You should definitely get an error in the log when starting the interface again if this is the case.
> 
> I personally have an xBee that was on a direct serial connection for almost a decade before I recently relocated it to a wiznet card over ethernet a few months ago. I have found a bug in the driver that I haven’t fixed yet in that it does not properly recover when the wiznet disconnects from the network. I’ve literally only had this happen while I was setting up the power for it and was disconnecting it periodically and then plugging it back in thinking it would reconnect. This caused it to require me to disable and re-enable the interface to get it going again. This is the only xBee issue I am currently aware of.
> 
> As for the RFX devices I have 2 in daily service. A legacy ethernet connected device that I am now using with the “new legacy” versions of the plugin. This device is rock solid and hasn’t hiccuped or dropped a signal in so long I can’t even tell you. It predates our moving to this house ;) The second one is one of their newer tiny grey boxed devices that only connects over USB. I am using it with the latest version of XTension and the newer of the plugins and it has been online for weeks since I last restarted it’s machine without it dropping anything obvious either. I know from the usage information that XTension sends to me by default every so often that people are using a lot of RFX devices and even a few other xBee networks that nobody felt the need to talk to me about though I’d love to hear more, So it’s not as simple as just being the latest version of XTension, but could definitely be a combination of things that I haven’t considered could be a problem.
> 
> 
> 
>> On Apr 3, 2021, at 11:40 PM, Burk Roberts <cyburk at gmail.com <mailto:cyburk at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> I don’t want to muddy the water on this discussion — and I will readily concede that what I’m about to say may have *absolutely* no bearing on it — but on the off chance that it’s related I’ll just mention that with the last couple releases of XTension I am seeing this same behavior from my XBees. (NOT on an M1 Mac.) They might work for a day or two, but then they go silent. As others have mentioned it sometimes takes a restart to get XTension to release the port, but at that point I can get XCTU to connect to the XBees and verify that they are in fact both still working fine even though XTension seems oblivious to what they are doing. 
>> 
>> After struggling with this for several weeks I rolled back to version 9.4.32 and (fingers crossed!) everything seems to have been running normally for over a week now.
>> 
>> Maybe those of you who are having RFX troubles would want to give that a try and see what happens?
>> 
> 
> Thanks,
>  James
> 
> 
> James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org <http://www.planetarygear.org/>		http://MacHomeAutomation.com <http://machomeautomation.com/>
> 
> 
> 
> 
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