Hi all,
I thought it might be useful/interesting to post what I observed with the behaviour of 1-wirereader.exe and WD when when my 1-wire network recently had problems.
After a long period of cold wet weather with consistent high humidity (sometimes 100% or close to it for several days) my normally very reliable 1-wire network developed a problem. I found WD with all instruments flat lining but the data light was still blinking and green. The Show/Hide function on the 1-wirereader.exe icon did not work and when I shut down the PC the End Program box appeared saying 1-wire.exe was not responding so I closed it and the PC then restarted.
After restart some instruments were again working but main temp was stuck on 6.4 deg and wind direction was not working.
I opened 1-wire.exe and the main temp showed “—” and the wind direction was showing “impossible” numbers such as 1832 degrees!!
Because it was still raining I was unwilling to go out and pull apart my FARS to check things out but after about 18 hours everything spontaneously recovered and is now back to normal.
I suspect it was a power problem somewhere as it was mostly instruments that use supplementary power that had problems. Who knows…water? insects ? collected crud becoming conductive???. In my few years experience with 1-wire I have found that any network problems are most likely related to the cat5 wires carrying the supplementary power…I guess maybe because the constanltly present higher voltage (in my case 17V) is much more likely to cause electrolytic corrosion or the like.
Some thoughts…
- Maybe it would be good if indications of problems in 1-wirereader.exe such as the “—” for main temp were actually passed through to the WD main screen rather than it continuing to display a false reading so as to make it obvious there is a problem.
- It would be good if the green blinking data light stopped or changed under fault conditions such as this especially since it appears 1-wirereader.exe had become unresponsive or locked up.
- It would be good if 1-wirereader.exe could report crazy data such as the wind directions I was seeing of 1832 degrees and somehow “raise the alarm” that something is wrong.
- On a positive note, this experience showed that WD now correctly “catches up” with any missed rain upon restart after a problem. I have not checked for many versions now but this didn’t use to work for me in the past.
I think the separate 1-wirereader.exe has been a major success.
I hope my experiences might help with ways to further improve it.
w0mbat