Tweet-a-watt issue: display on kill-a-watt cycling off and on

[dd1968]

After modifying a Kill-A-Watt with the Tweet-A-Watt kit I encountered an issue where the display on the Kill-A-Watt would not come on and stay on. The K-A-W display would flicker to life but when the green light blinked the display would go off and the K-A-W would reset. The assembly instructions indicated that it might take 30 seconds or so for the K-A-W to settle down but mine didn't, even after a few minutes.

I came to the forums and found two threads that seemed to speak to this issue. In both cases the adafruit-support answer was to increase the delay on the transmitter side. I wanted to share my experience here with a resolution in case it might help the next person...

In my case the issue was not the transmitter delay setting but the fact that I hadn't configured the transmitter, period. I got ahead of myself and, after assembling all the hardware, I plugged In the K-A-W. The steps for assembly are NOT "build the receiver, build the transmitter, plug it in" but, significantly, "build the receiver, "CONFIGURE, build the transmitter".

The link to the "configure" step:

[http://www.ladyada.net/make/tweetawatt/config.html]

I have a feeling that others have made the same mistake that I made or will do so. I am more than happy to admit that in my haste I missed an entire step.

Once the transmitter was configured I had no more trouble with the K-A-W display...it settled down within about 30 seconds.

A note about configuration of the transmitter: the instructions say that (in the terminal software) you need to get the modem's attention by waiting ten seconds then typing +++ quickly. That "quickly" part escaped me at first and I had a hard time figuring out why the modem wouldn't respond. Eventually I figured out that "quickly" is the key word in that instruction. Typing +++ QUICKLY did the trick.

[adafruit_support_bill]

Thanks for the follow-up. We'll keep that in mind when others post with the same symptoms.