Comment on RPi Pico "disconnects" after a few minutes to days

• dgriffith@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Hmm I’m not sure of the pin drive currents on the Pico, but can you power the sensor off a pin? At least then you can programmatically power cycle the sensor if you need to.

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  • agressivelyPassive@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    can you power the sensors off a pin? At least then you can programmatically power cycle them if you need to.

    Not really, at least I wouldn’t really know how. The sensor needs +3V, GND and two data pins, and the pico only has one 3V out, that seems to connect directly to the voltage regulator. I guess, I could try to use a GPIO pin as a switchable 3V out, but that seems rather hacky.

    The Pico also has a watchdog, you could set it up to give it a reboot if things don’t respond in time. It doesn’t solve the issues of course but at least it gets it back to a workable state

    Unfortunately, a simple machine.reset() seems not to be enough. I didn’t use “real” watchdogs, but what a Java dev knows: try/catch. I wrapped the entire loop in a try/except block and simply call machine.reset() if something goes wrong. That does work sometimes, but not always. Of course the possibilities are a) some exception isn’t getting caught b) there is some electronic issue, maybe the SPI interface to the DHT is “stuck” or not properly reset. I can resolve the problems by completely disconnecting the device for a while from power.

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