RA Star Instability

sbidny0 · Post by **sbidny0** » Wed Sep 08, 2021 2:01 pm

I recently upgraded from RA Plus to RA Star, and I am experiencing some odd behavior. Some of the symptoms include:

All I/O expansion channels briefly flash to "on" and then back to their normal values
Water levels briefly change to 0 and then back to their normal values
pH probes show very high or very low values and eventually return to normal

When I compiled in Arduino recently, I believe I saw the following message:

"Low memory available, stability problems may occur."

Could this be related to the issues I'm seeing? I didn't have these same issues with RA Plus.

I'm happy to do further debugging, if anyone has any ideas on what steps to take next.

Thanks!

sbidny0 · Post by **sbidny0** » Fri Sep 10, 2021 10:41 am

Anyone have anything thoughts on this? Right now, the controller is actually working against me. My skimmer is shutting down because it thinks the skimmate container is full. My pH values are killing my kalk reactor and calcium reactor. But these changes only last a second before returning to correct values.

rimai · Post by **rimai** » Mon Sep 13, 2021 8:55 pm

Try moving the power cables away from the USB cables and sensor cables

sbidny0 · Post by **sbidny0** » Mon Sep 27, 2021 8:56 pm

No luck it seems. Also changed the USB cable to the Expansion Hub with no improvement.

A few more details, now that I've observed for longer...

Eventually I notice that my skimmer isn't running (due to a falsely triggered skimmer waste float). When I do, the pH on my Reef Angel Star reads low (mid-7s), while the pH Expansion continues to read correctly.

I attempt to restart the skimmer. This results in no updates from the Reef Angel to the UApp for a few seconds. Then multiple values on UApp show zeros and my flags tab lights up for a second. Once everything settles down, sometimes my skimmer stops again, due to another falsely triggered waste float. After a few tries, my skimmer does start up again.

When the skimmer does restart, the pH on the Reef Angel Star reads high (mid-9s), while again, the pH Expansion reads correctly. It then slowly drifts back down to a correct value, until we start the cycle all over again.

Here is a video of what I see via UApp while this is going on:

https://youtu.be/ygeYqI0-iaI

rimai · Post by **rimai** » Mon Sep 27, 2021 10:59 pm

Looks like some sort of stray voltage coming from somewhere.

sbidny0 · Post by **sbidny0** » Wed Sep 29, 2021 8:38 am

Well, it appears that at least some of the issue was caused by my CoralVue Hydros plugged into the Reef Angel. Removing it has seemingly stabilized things. pH is definitely much more stable now. I don't seem to be randomly triggering false alerts any longer.

However, not everything is right yet. When I try to start my skimmer from a full stop, it does seem that I'm still falsely triggering some inputs. It still takes a few tries to get it going. But once it's going, it seems to be much more stable.

Reef Angel Forum