[stavros]

I created some sensor boards based on the ESP8266, they worked well for a while but lately they've been getting flaky. I'm a mediocre hardware engineer at best, so if anyone has any tips on how to make my board more stable, they would be appreciated.

Here's the board, it's a bit of a generic light/motion/presence sensor with an IR LED:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/sensor-board

[taneq]

Do you know which aspect is getting flaky? Ie. Is the wifi dropping out temporarily, or permanently, or the whole MCU locking up, or the 3.3V browning out, or…?

[stavros]

I'm not entirely sure, I can't debug because I don't have a serial interface to it. The board just stops responding to MQTT commands. I do see a lot of "connecting to MQTT" debug messages over the network, so I assume it does have WiFi. I should try pinging and see if it disconnects.

[taneq]

There’s your first lesson: Always have a debug header with serial pins on your board. ;) It should be easy enough to solder some wires onto the ESP32’s serial port… although wait, how are you programming it?

It’s also good to have a couple of status LEDs and a power indicator on any custom board. Then you can add blink codes to indicate errors etc.

[stavros]

I programmed it once and then flash OTA, I couldn't add LEDs because they messed skfh fbe photodiode's readings.

[brcmthrowaway]

Use osc instead

[stavros]

What's that?

[brcmthrowaway]

OpenSoundControl

Easy protocol to control devices