#Espressif Border Router

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

novel spindle
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So I got a couple of the Espressif OTBR boards and flashed them and they work great.

Only issue is I can't seem to power them..... When connected to a PC (the dev box I flashed it from or my laptop) it works fine but if I plug it in via power supply it just won't start.

I have tried different cables, old basic power connectors, big ones that support like 100w PD and various ones in between with different leads but always the same.

I can't for the life of me figure out what would cause this

round silo
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The board only needs basic 5V usb power; any old 5V 1A charger with a USB-A port should work just fine…

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I have mine plugged in via the USB2 port (the one connected to the ESP32-S3).

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what exactly do you mean by "won't start"? Does the red light on the board light up?

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Keep in mind that depending which config options you select, it might boot up but not actually auto-connect to the network.

novel spindle
round silo
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hmm, can't say i have experience with the softap config. if the red light is lit the power is probably fine, so it's more likely to be a code logic issue than a power issue.

novel spindle
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Yeah but I can't figure out why it happily auto connects when connected to a PC. The SoftAP should just set the SSID and password (which seemed better than doing it manually but perhaps it is buggy)

round silo
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which esp-idf and esp-thread-br versions are you using?

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looks like it might have been a bug introduced in esp-idf 5.5 / esp-thread-br 1.3

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using esp-idf 5.4 / esp-thread-br 1.2 might be more stable

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i was thinking of upgrading my own to 1.3 today... guess I'll hold off on that :)

novel spindle
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Went with 5.5.2 and 1.3. going to reflash with the WiFi hard coded and see if that works any better

round silo
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i wouldn't be surprised if it's broken with hardcoded credentials too, given the other reported issues. I recommend switching to 5.4.3 and 1.2 instead.

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there's been some bugfixes in esp-thread-br since the 1.2 tag, i suspect commit 81e5f31f0072f62d545f9c9e7c95afecfa4a0d1d is the last one that has the old network initialization code and will work with esp-idf 5.4

novel spindle
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any reason not to try 5.5 and 1.2 ?

round silo
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i suspect you might get compatibility issues due to changes in the newer esp-idf version.

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oh, that's annoying, my esp-thread-br devkit is the old revision where the esp32-s3 only has 4mb flash; they changed the partitioning in the newer revisions in a way that assumes you have the 8mb flash version.

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ah, it might work, the changes in the 5.x releases are all supposed to be mostly compatible...

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i'd recommend sticking with 5.4 for now, and wait for a bugfix update to the 1.3 release before switching to 5.5

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oh, never mind, that console change was included in both 5.5 and 5.4

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most of the other thread bugfixes are also available in 5.4 too tho.

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… it's possible it might be broken with esp-idf 5.4.3 as well, in which case you'd have to go back to esp-idf 5.4.2 to get it working.

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well, this is actually kind of annoying. it looks like going forwards they aren't gonna support building for the 4MB flash version of the thread border router devkit any more :( I could probably figure out a way to make it fit if I remove support for doing over-the-air updates which i'm not using anyways.

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anyways, i have a second backup thread br available, so I'll try building the older thread br code with esp-idf 5.5.2 to see whether or not it works.

novel spindle
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I missed updating a version and I got compilation error when I tried 5.4.3 and 1.3 but I should have read the release notes....

5.4.3 and 1.2 worked and that connects fine