Web Interface with NTP server

A little share..... Working on a project that may never se the light of day but is a good learning platform. My goal was to see how reliable this was. The current version is wifi only based on an esp8266. That seems to be solid. However I was asked if it could log data (currently it just sends an email).

 

 

Video at one point says WiFi card when I meant to say ethernet. Oops.

Being retired I though it would be fun, then I was also asked if I could send RS232 messages.... That turned out to be fairly straightforward....... I had a lot of issues with reliability... First the Web interface was a bit unreliable.... However before looking to deep I put a large capacitor on the power rail on a little demi hat built so simplify wiring and holds the pull ups and some zener protection diodes.

The RTC is a generic module and the timelib is used however I have control of the updates from the NPT. If a synch does not work it pickles another server and tries again. I seem to have more miss updates with the ethernet interface but generally it does a good job.. The test interface uses an 8266 and seems to keep very good time without an RTC. I am still learning about how the libraries work

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The main changes to the Web interface SW were to take care to call ethernet maintain and to allow a bit more time for the server to update data.

The SD card is more reliable with the larger capacitor from what I can tell however it still sometimes does not read unless ejected and re inserted. I put in a reset strategy and it times out so it may be related to the card?? But I only got that from a post somewhere.

There is a lot going on but very happy with the Mega it has lots of i/o and serial channels..

I did try and port this all onto an 8266 but found myself having all sorts of issues as I needed a ethernet module. For some reason I could not get two Spi units to work at the same time..... But was fighting for i/o anyhow.

The ethernet card is a W5100 based unit as an fyi.

 

Video :