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

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dd1968
 
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Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2011 12:11 am

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

Post by 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.

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

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

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

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miketranch
 
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Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 9:10 pm

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

Post by miketranch »

I was inspired by the Tweet-a-watt project to do my own project, based on JeeNode and later, Moteino (Arduino compatibles with on-board RFM12B tranceiver.)

I also ran into problems with the KAW power supply and posted a few videos and blogs on How I got it working. Most of my efforts were on the low voltage board, and I was able to get it to work at 120 Vac, but it was iffy below that.

In the end, the real solution was to add more capacitance on the HV board. It now starts and works great, even at 100 Vac! Details here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQZlAW3eGmU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fya7AwTizu4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmxcBgojgJI

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