I’m using a Particle Photon board (Sparkfun redboard), and using the Particle/Blynk ported library.
It successfully connects to Cayenne and I am sending the Wifi signal strength to a virtual pin, and it works well.
The other part of my project is to activate a sprinkler solenoid (one of 4) through a relay attached to digital pins D0-D3. The relay board is active low, to I’ve ticked the inverted logic checkbox.
I am able to successfully control the relay board most times through the dashboard by clicking on the actuator, although sometimes on windows (Edge and Chrome) I need to frequently refresh the browser page for it to work.
So the next step was to create 2 schedules for each actuator - one to turn on, and the other to turn it off.
I first tested this by making a single shot schedule for my timezone, and it seemed to work when it was only 5-10 minutes from the current time.
I’ve had mixed results setting up repeating schedules (not firing at all that I can see) on a daily basis, and even single shot schedules don’t seem to work when they are scheduled well in advance.
I’ve even had a case where I configured the schedule to send me an email, and I got the email but not the message on the virtual pin to the Photon board.
So, I’m at the point where I can manually trigger the actuator via a webpage or via the Android app reasonably reliably, but repeating schedules or far in advance single shot schedules don’t seem to fire.
Are you able to explain more about how the schedules are implemented so I can get some reliability into the dashboard? I’m assuming that the schedule runs entirely on your server (regardless whether I have the client dashboard open or active), and when the schedule runs it communicates directly with the target microcontroller via the virtual pin write where I can handle the interface to the pins controlling the relay board?
Is this how it works, and can you suggest any techniques I can use to debug the firing of schedules?
Thanks,
Grant