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    Suddenly Stopped Working

    I have 2 short range tags and they have been working flawlessly for about 3 weeks. No false trips, no strange tags. All of a sudden at the same time both tags reported "away" and there has been no further updates in the CheaperRFID Status screen for several days now. Last Update & Last Change are identical times - 4/15/2007 8:53:40 AM. There is no entry in the HS log that would indicate a problem.

    Before I take the radical steps of power cycling the receiver, restarting HS or even rebooting, I would like some suggestions of problem solving steps so I can determine the root cause of the problem and prevent it from reoccurring.

    Your help is appreciated.
    Frank

    #2
    Frank, Maybe its the batteries? Shut down HS and look at at the RFID reciever with Hyperterminal. If you see it there or not then you can tell if your transmitter is working or not. I am currently still testing with 1X8m, 3X40M and 2FOBs. I have also purchased a second reciever and testing it in the attic. I had purchased a RS antenna but it works fine in the attic with the little pigtail antenna.
    - Pete

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      #3
      Pete, Thanks for the suggestion however It would be a heck of a coincidence if it's the batteries because both tags stopped transmitting at exactly the same time to the second. I was hoping that there was something that I could do before shutting down HS. I don't want to loose any evidence of root cause.

      Anybody know what the expected battery life is in the 8m transmitters?
      Any other troubleshooting suggestions?

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        #4
        I have two recievers / 2 applications running and occasionally I have seen one just stop with no I/O. I shut down the application and restart it and all is well. I do not shut down HS to do this.
        - Pete

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          #5
          Pete, when the updates stop do you know if the raw data is being received through the COM port? You can actually just look at the tray icon to see if it is blinking to know if raw data is being received.

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            #6
            Originally posted by Pete View Post
            I have two recievers / 2 applications running and occasionally I have seen one just stop with no I/O. I shut down the application and restart it and all is well. I do not shut down HS to do this.
            I assume since you have 2 receivers you can verify that the tags are still transmitting when one of the 2 receiver's I/O stops. Correct? If yes, this isolates the problem to the receiving side of the system.

            If your application is outside of HS then is understandable that you would not need to restart HS. If you are having the same problem with a non-HS app then that points to a hardware issue. If the I/O stops occasionally there must be some sort of problem possibly with the receiver. The PC COM port may have a hardware problem but I doubt it.

            The only application I am using is HS. I would like to find out what's going wrong and have a robust solution not requiring application restarts.


            Originally posted by Michael McSharry View Post
            Pete, when the updates stop do you know if the raw data is being received through the COM port? You can actually just look at the tray icon to see if it is blinking to know if raw data is being received.
            I don't have a tray icon which displays CheaperRFID plug-in/serial port activity. Are you using a different application?

            Thanks for the replys, Frank

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              #7
              It is xapmcsRFID http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=120345. It produces a figure of merit for the peristence of the signal (Device Value) and provides composite status (Device Status) if more than one receiver is used. Individual device status is also available. The composite uses hysteresis with a wide dead band to provide a "confirmed" type status indication. Homeseer updates are received via xAP messages.

              I have never seen a hard loss of RFID transmission if the tag is at the proper range. The consecutive missing receptions probability curve is pretty flat so periods of a few minutes without a reception is not as far out into the tails of the curve as I would like to see. Just a few spot checks have shown probability of no reception for 1 minute to be about 0.2% and for 2 minutes to be about .04%. While this is not great for presence detection, the real problem gets to be in the 15 second or so range where the probability is sufficiently high that it make these tags not practical for proximity detection such as one would like to use when changing the defaults for a touch sceen display when a particular person approaches.

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                #8
                Originally posted by Michael McSharry View Post
                It is xapmcsRFID http://board.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=120345. It produces a figure of merit for the peristence of the signal (Device Value) and provides composite status (Device Status) if more than one receiver is used. Individual device status is also available. The composite uses hysteresis with a wide dead band to provide a "confirmed" type status indication. Homeseer updates are received via xAP messages.

                I have never seen a hard loss of RFID transmission if the tag is at the proper range. The consecutive missing receptions probability curve is pretty flat so periods of a few minutes without a reception is not as far out into the tails of the curve as I would like to see. Just a few spot checks have shown probability of no reception for 1 minute to be about 0.2% and for 2 minutes to be about .04%. While this is not great for presence detection, the real problem gets to be in the 15 second or so range where the probability is sufficiently high that it make these tags not practical for proximity detection such as one would like to use when changing the defaults for a touch sceen display when a particular person approaches.
                Certainly a lower dection interval like 15s is highly desirable for most "proximity" applications.

                If I understand your data, I agree 0.2% is poor reliability. I'm not sure at what confidence level your 0.2% estimate is based on however, I believe this means at 1 minute detection interval there is a probability of over 20 false trips per week. If at 95%. it is not good.

                Is this using more than 1 receiver and the figure of merit data?
                Any ideas on how to improve reliability with short "Tag "Off" Timeout"?

                In practice using piper's plug-in, I have been using a 1 minute time out for 3 weeks and I have not experienced any false trips until things suddenly stopped. One 8m tag is in the house on a counter ~8m away. The second tag is in a car, in an attached garage taped to the windshield ~13m away.

                I do not know anything about xap but I would like to...

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by Pete View Post
                  Frank, Maybe its the batteries? Shut down HS and look at at the RFID reciever with Hyperterminal. If you see it there or not then you can tell if your transmitter is working or not. I am currently still testing with 1X8m, 3X40M and 2FOBs. I have also purchased a second reciever and testing it in the attic. I had purchased a RS antenna but it works fine in the attic with the little pigtail antenna.

                  I checked the battery voltage in-situ and it's 2.999V, so they are fine. I'm convinced that the problem is NOT with the tags.

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                    #10
                    I collected 5 days of data with a single receiver with a stationary tag about 10 ft from the receiver. I had two periods where there was silence for about 2 minutes. Periods of 1 minute or so would occur two or three times a day. I used this data to develop the signal processing algorithm. I have not gone back to look at what my experience has been for either single or dual receiver reporting. Data is being collected in a database, but the controlled aspect of the experiment is no longer being enforced. A single 5 day sampling does not yield a high statitical confidence level, but it is what I based my usabilty conculsions on.

                    On a casual observation I can see the tray icons blink most of the time in unison which indicates both receivers see the same thing. One of the receivers does drop out quite a bit more often than the other. They are both in the same x,y house coordinate with the more reliable one 10 ft higher that the other. My data collection was with the lower level receiver.

                    xAP is no more that a LAN interface to Homeseer. If you can install a Homeseer plugin to read X10 on the powerline, then you can install one to read xAP messages on the LAN.

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                      #11
                      Michael, when the tag dropped out I did not see any data from the tag in both of the IO windows. I then removed the tag and connected it inside of the house with a 12VDC 200Mw transformer and still did not see the tag. I then connected it to a 12VDC 500Mw transformer and I do see the tag. Odd in that the tag has been working fine now for over a month. I had the same occur with a tag mounted in the BMW.
                      - Pete

                      Auto mator
                      Homeseer 3 Pro - 3.0.0.548 (Linux) - Ubuntu 18.04/W7e 64 bit Intel Haswell CPU 16Gb
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