Hotspot debugging

[A Former User]

Hi,

I recently bought 2 Pycom Helium hotspots and I'm trying to get them working.
De registration flow worked (after I reseated the boards inside the housing) and I was able to set the location in the helium explorer where they show up as online.
In my WiFi router I see that they are connected and are sending small packets of data during the day.
I'm not getting any witnesses atm and i'm trying to debug why this is. (Coverage or other issues)
I tried checking the log of the USBC but i'm not getting any smarter.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1--XOMWfeFKa0gK2sfN-FJDxWSzQmrnC8Xbv0JjEj2Ps/edit?usp=sharing
Is there a portal or webserver running on the device with more info?

Any help is appreciated too fix my 0 witnesses atm!
Marvin

[DC]

@Jason-Timmins
I have several hotspots placed at friends, relatives, and offices. I stuck with makers that were into IoT before helium was a thing. RAK, SenseCAP (Seeed), Heltec and now Pycom. Seems all of them get a bad firmware update from time to time. I've gotten in the habit of imaging the SD cards of the ones that use SD storage. (Heltec uses non-removable eMMC) The Pycom hotspot is a great performer, so I hope they work out the kinks in the coming weeks. I sent another user a zipped SD card image to get him going again.

[N M]

@Nathan-Moss

Had a bit of time today to console into it, looks like the filesystem has corrupted.

Guess its a support ticket.

fsck.ext4: Read-only file system while trying to open /dev/mmcblk0p2

check of the device.
fsck exited with status code 8

[   10.955788] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p2): write access unavailable, cannot proceed (try mounting with noload)
mount: mounting /dev/mmcblk0p2 on /root failed: Read-only file system
mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /run on /root/run failed: No such file or directory
BusyBox v1.30.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.30.1-7ubuntu3) multi-call binary.

Free initramfs and switch to another root fs:
chroot to NEW_ROOT, delete all in /, move NEW_ROOT to /,
execute NEW_INIT. PID must be 1. NEW_ROOT must be a mountpoint.

No init found. Try passing init= bootarg.

[N M]

@Marvin-Dinneweth
Same issue here, its the Tx light on the PyGate board that's solid red.
Bit of googling indicates it might be bricked...

[A Former User]

Sinds today the miner is not even showing up on my WiFi AP anymore.
The led is now constant red so i'm a bit stuck...

[Jason Timmins]

@DC
Yes, I'm seeing much the same from my miner too. If I restart it, it seems to boot and settle down but then, as you say, after a time there are masses of disk activity and everything seems to grind to a halt. I'm in IT and I've been working with Linux since the mid-90's, I find it desperately frustrating that I can't just login and see what's going on. Even a web GUI would be fine for now.

I'm really disappointed with Pycom's lack of response to these issues. I've used Pycom gear for years and their products are good, but this miner seems rushed. I've made a direct request for support, but even that has gone unanswered. It's all very frustrating.

I'm not here to make money, I'm here because I'm an IoT fan (I ran a small TTN node before this) and I'd like my LoRaWAN projects to connect to my hotspot! I've got a little LoRaWAN-enabled GPS tracker, it refuses to connect to my hotspot in the loft, but will happily connect to one down the road or16km away! <mutter>

Come on @pycom and @Pete-Allen-0, help us and tell us what's going on.

[DC]

@Jason-Timmins
I bought a few and have one up and running for almost 2 weeks now. I had an issue with the SD card and ended up cloning one from a new hotspot to get it going again. The firmware it ships with doesn't have web diagnostics, that gets enabled after it auto-updates. As far as performance goes, it is the same as the RAK v2 it replaced.

I have one on my desk, powered and hooked to WiFi, but not onboarded. The disk activity light on the CM4 header is almost constantly on, but if I power cycle it, it will restart and disk activity will return to normal (a few blinks here and there) - but it will return to its almost constant on state after 12 or so hours. I wonder what is going on inside of it?

These hotspots are new and some bugs are to be expected, I get that. But the general lack of support from Pycom, and poor documentation, is a bit of a let down.

[Jason Timmins]

Apparently, you point your browser at the miner's IP address and up comes a dashboard that you can sign-in to. I say, 'Apparently', because it doesn't work for my miner and several others on this forum.

Sadly, Pycom don't seem to be terribly helpful. I'm new to miners and I'm seeing similar things to you. I can see beacons being answered and even the odd reward but then it all stops and goes deathly quiet. I try restarting but it really don't seem to help. Is this what Helium mining is like or is Pycom's miner a PoS?