IWR6843ISK-ODS: Sensor hangs after one or two days of run

Hi Radha,

Do you know if the MSS or DSS is failing when the sensor hangs? Is the device still chirping when it crashes?

Thanks,

Justin

Hi Justin,

I don't know if the mss or dss fails. How do I check that? I get nothing in and out of serial ports. Please tell me if the soft reboots are causing any hang.

Thanks,

radha.

Hi Radha,

I suspect that the UART may be failing to send data. A couple steps to take:

1. Can you clarify when you get noting in or out of UART ports, have you checked the UART Com Port to see if the mmwDemo>: prompt is still appearing? You can check this will utilities like Tera Term or Putty.
2. DSS send a mailbox message to MSS when it sends the point cloud over - you could have the MSS toggle the LED when this happens, then at 20 frames, you would see a 10 Hz blinking light. (I already set the GPIO to blink when the tracker reports a target, remove this line from the tracker report function and move it to the mailbox receive function). This will show if the DSS is still working or not.
3. If you can confirm that the DSS is still providing points, then the MSS is failing. Since I suspect UART, I would recommend using a similar LED blink strategy in the UART send task - this will show if the software is still entering this task. If we are entering the task but not sending data, we can take steps to debug from there.

Please report back with your results.

Regards,

Justin

Hi Justin,

1. When I meant no data is coming from the UART, I checked it using PUTTY. No data or no prompt in both the ports.

2. I have modified the LED blink to see if it receives any data from dss.  But the hang will take 1 or 2 days to occur.

3. Once there is no issue with dss, i will test with this.

Thanks,

radha.

Hi Justin,

WIth the LED toggle, I think the UART hangs. I can see no data over PUTTY in both the ports and that the LEDs are not toggling when the hang happens.

Also I see this in only one hardware out of 2. So how to recover from this hang? I'm thinking of implementing a watchdog timer. 

Thanks,

radha.

Hi Radha,

There are two options for you to try:

1. The easiest, and I would recommend starting here, is to lower the loggingUartBaudRate (this is the DATA COM Port uart) to 921600 - currently it is 1843200, which is higher than has been tried with other demos. This may be causing a failure. You should also increase the frame time to 70 ms, to avoid crashes due to the increased UART output time.  If this does not show a crash, we can move to debugging why the higher output rate causes issues.
2. There could be an issue with the XDS110 with the higher output rate. You could determine this by connecting a different micro-controller like a Raspberry pi to the UART ports and using this to send config and read back data at the default demo baud rate. If this does not present any issues, then most likely the XDS110 is failing after some time due to the high baud rate. This would explain the failure of the UART COM Port as well.

Regards,

Justin

Hi Justin,

In my original post, I already told that I'm running under the baudrate 921600 with frame rate 60 ms. Still the hang occurs. Now i have changed the frame rate to 70 ms. I will test with this.

Thanks,

radha.

Hi Justin,

I tried the first method but the hang persists. The issue is also with one sensor only (one device). I suspect this to be a hardware issue.

For the the second case, how do I use UART pins bypassing the XDS110 connector to confirm that XDS110 is causing the issue? Please provide me details on how to use UART directly. Can you give me details of board file or schematics?

Thanks, 

radha.

Hi Radha,

I am investigating the hang on my end, to try to determine if the gui is at fault. I will give an answer for that next week.

For interfacing to another device, you will need to see the EVM User's guide. 

1. Find the UART pins in table 5

2. Read the switching scheme to understand how to change UART to the output pins instead of the XDS110. See table 1, look at position for 40 Pin LP/BP

Without changing the device software, you can try interfacing to the device through UART pins and running the parser on something like an RPi

Regards,

Justin

Thanks Justin. Looking forward for the new fixed code.

I hope there is some kind of notification when the new release is done.