(up to August 19th 2019) River System status

Sub-forum to hold river system status topics
TerryJC
Posts: 2616
Joined: 16/05/2017, 17:17

Re: River System status

Post by TerryJC »

Penri wrote: 03/08/2019, 23:36I’ve just spent a long time typing up an analysis of the results only for the forum to time me out as I submitted, loosing it all, grrrr.
If I know that my posting is likely to take a while or I get called away half-way through I try to remember to save it as draft. I still get caught though.
Penri wrote: 03/08/2019, 23:36I concentrated on the files before yesterday and noted that the both butts probes and float switches all looked good, the Gate Valve showed activity (by the way does a negative gate position reading (I saw -58 mean a spurious Closed or an Open at 58%?), but the Sump was reporting an unchanging 550mm,
I've noticed -58 in the values before, but it always seemed to recover OK. I don't think anything in the system is going to react to the erroneous value (it's just for reporting purposes), so I didn't worry about it. If it's a problem, the gate valve code could be modified to reject -58 as a reading (it always seems to be -58), or even any negative value.
Penri wrote: 03/08/2019, 23:36Looking back through the files in this group, it appears to have been at that level since 09:07 on the 25Jul19. Before that time is was varying as we would expect.

A simple explanation would be a stuck float but when I checked the sump on Tuesday 30Jul19 and saw that it was overflowing I’m positive I didn’t observe the float below the water surface.

Other explanations welcome.
This is more serious and I cannot think why it might occur.
Penri wrote: 03/08/2019, 23:36As I understand it if the sump level was reported at 550mm the control algorithm would not have opened the Gate Valve, so in that respect the system was operating as expected.

I was interested by your comment on the 04:00 re-boot Hamish, it certainly wasn’t me at that time of day, but I will own up to multiple soft and hard re-starts of the system in part and as a whole yesterday and today. Could it be that the RPi clocks didn’t re-sync, particularly if I took individual devices down. Whether it’s associated or not I did see that in the G4:M0 03Aug19 file the first time-stamp is 03:06 and the second 02:17.

On a positive note, I have long suspected that the Stage Butts sub-system was suffering from a slow leak, the probe measurements does not appear to bear that out. Any water they capture, albeit slowly, seems to stay put.
If the resync isn't working then all the bets are off wrt to the Readings. As it is at the moment, the Pis are only synced at boot-up. Hamish and I were discussing the idea of devolving that job to the Software Framework and doing it each time the software started up. A better idea might be a cron job or a Python apscheduler job to sync the clocks on a regular basis (every day perhaps).
Terry
hamishmb
Posts: 1891
Joined: 16/05/2017, 16:41

Re: River System status

Post by hamishmb »

I always tend to copy my postings to the clipboard before submitting just in case it does that. Using the back button in the browser sometimes brings it back so you can copy it.

So this is the same old problem with the newer probes, but IIRC we never figured out why it was happening. Annoying, but I don't know what we can do about it. Given only a full power cycle fixed it, rather than a software reset, I feel like this has something to do with hardware. However, I did fix a bunch of small issues in the hall effect probe code, so hopefully it will work better once I update the software.

I noticed it sometimes reads negative values before, but I don't know why. I don't see how it happens software-side, so maybe a spurious voltage reading from the ADC?

I've just implemented hourly time-syncing in the framework, so when I update it that will hopefully fix the time-related issues.
Hamish
Penri
Posts: 1284
Joined: 18/05/2017, 21:28

Re: River System status

Post by Penri »

Popped in this morning to help clear weed from river.
Quickly polled RPis, Gate Valve CPU running at 100% and reporting > 48degrees C. So I soft restarted it. Came up and opened valve to around 25%, which looked about right for sump level.
hamishmb
Posts: 1891
Joined: 16/05/2017, 16:41

Re: River System status

Post by hamishmb »

Oh yes, the gate valve code now runs more efficiently too and uses much less CPU power, so hopefully that might help too if overheating plays any part in this.

Sounds good
Hamish
Penri
Posts: 1284
Joined: 18/05/2017, 21:28

Re: River System status

Post by Penri »

Currently I’m moving water from Stage to Wendy Buuts by switching Butts pump to manual on and opening Stage ball valve. Everything appears to be working correctly again. I’ll be here until the sump reaches its required level and the Gate Valve closes.
TerryJC
Posts: 2616
Joined: 16/05/2017, 17:17

Re: River System status

Post by TerryJC »

The Gate Valve that I tested here last week was running at around 2%.

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Terry
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