CC3000 stability issues?

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2014-02-20 by hansamann

Hi all,

I am currently exploring the "best" prototyping platform for a little project, I've used the Spark Core already for example and know that the CC3000 seems to have real issues in "chatty" WiFi environments. Nevertheless, I am wondering if there is somethign I could do from an Espruino point of view.

The error I am getting is this:

ERROR: Timeout in CC3000 driver (4103)
ERROR: Connect failed
at line 22 col 13
    req.end();
             ^
in function called from system
Looks like CC3000 has died again. Power cycling...

My code is doing a HTTP post request, then once data has been received, it will schedule the same request again after 5 seconds. Ideally I would like to get a constant server-client connection, WebSockets or so, but I think if simple HTTP requests are a stability issue, I won't go in this area.

Is there a way to

• make it more stable?
• or could I at least reset the CC3000 somehow, catch the exception it did throw and start again?

Thx!
Sven

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2014-02-20 by @gfwilliams

Hi Sven,

At the moment it's all a bit difficult. The CC3000 driver is horrible and will just randomly stop working if there's any issue with SPI comms. I'm hoping as time goes on we'll find a way to make it more reliable, but what's happening right now is IMO what you want:

• You make a request
• CC3000 driver (or CC3000) just hangs - however this could just be because of a slow DNS server
• Espruino detects the hang, backs out, reboots the CC3000 and reconnects it.

So what you could do is set a timeout before you execute the HTTP request - then if the HTTP request hasn't succeeded by the time the timeout is called, you can just issue it again.

Hope that helps,