DIY-Pro-Kit-Pre-Soldered Reboots too often

#1

I have an original DIY-Pro-Kit-Pre-Soldered

ESP8266
etc.

It has always given me trouble with rebooting randomly.

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I want to finally deal with it.
First I disconnected everything except the temp/humidity & screen (but also disabled all code except temp/humidity).

[insert cool image, new users can’t post more than 1 embedded, /sad]

Ran fine.
So I added the Senseair S8
And it reset.
Took a lot longer…but still.

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I am now testing a ESP32 based D1 Mini to see if it related to the ESP8266 D1 (bad batch) or something else.

My question is something like this:

  • What are my options at this point?
  • I see there are 9+ versions now?
  • There are now new display locations so which ones are compatible with my PCB and/or case?
  • Should I order a new PCB with the new fancy things?
  • Can I just add huge capacitors to the circuit (seems to me like it is power related).
  • Or is it related to the traces/PCB (IIRC something about that in the forums when the new versions got started).
  • What ESPHome firmware should I be running now? (I always had issues getting publishing my results to the Air Gradient website, Home Assistant works just fine tho.)

Disclaimer:
Achim is always so helpful. I believe in the mission and want to help.
I wanted to leverage the community and am willing to fund whatever changes personally.
IE Not a support request.

#2

We’ve had our fair share of encountering this issue as seen from this thread: Airgradient rebooting itself?, as well as other discussions on other forums with the d1 mini reboot issue.

Mine is a DIY Basic though but I might as well share since the components are similar. The workaround I used is related to the PM sensor. If you’re using ESPHome, open to soldering wires, and your TX/RX pins are still available in your board, you can try the workaround I used here: Airgradient rebooting itself? - #80 by mascot1579

#3

I think the fundamental limitation of the ESP8266 is that we need to use software serial because it lacks a 2nd hardware serial that the ESP32 has. This makes it in general a lot less stable and I believe causes a lot of these resets.

Since switching the PRO to the ESP32 we see much more stability hardware wise (with the stock AirGradient firmware). So I would recommend you get the v9 board with the ESP32-C3. However I also understand that the ESPHome version still experiences reboots. Probably @MallocArray can give more information on this.

#4

I’ve seen similar with my devices. Right now I disabled my 5Ghz network and the ESP32 based devices started getting uptimes of 20-200 hours while the ESP8266 still reboot every 2-8 hours. I’ve even tried not enabling the S8 and PMS5003 to see if it was software serial related, but still get reboots often.

So I’m still attempting to track things down. But in the end, it doesn’t seem to make much difference other than the NOx and VOC measurements, since the reference gets reset on a reboot.

My latest ESPHome config is 2.0.1. If you want to run that, you can make sure you are on that version. It works with ESPHome 2023.12.0 and later