SDK and radio parameters

eggze · October 1, 2018, 8:12pm

Hey,

I was checking the documentation on this topic but I couldn’t find anything useful. Is there a way to see and adjust parameters of the radio component/transmission? For example how many times a message is send (I saw somewhere it’s currently repeated 5×).

The reason is that I would like to improve the coverage in my house + garden. It’s pretty good right now but sometimes some messages are lost anyway. I would like to see if there is a way to improve it (and I’m aware of the fact that I will shorten operation time on batteries but I don’t mind it that much).

Thank you

Karel · October 2, 2018, 9:27am

Hi,
message is repeated 6 times, if doesn’t receive ACK packet from dongle.

hub.martin · October 2, 2018, 9:45am

Hi,

@Karel did some porting of the BigClown radio protocol to some other radio module we use. Thanks to his work we plan to port and implement our own radio layer without ST radio library which is unnecesarilly big and complex. Not sure when, it won’t be in the near future. The advantage is that our custom library will have more options to fine-tune the radio communication.

Current radio speed and other parameters are set to the almost best values. So there’s not much to improve, or it is really complicated thanks to current ST radio library.

The biggest improvement would be to physically place the Radio Dongle to the better position/orientation. I did some testing while ago and the best placement for dongle is vertically with an antenna and PCB pointing UP. And the USB cable (I use USB extension coord) going down.
The same applies to the remote nodes, put them by the USB connector on the ground and the antenna up if it’s possile.

In the green box in the link below there are my testing videos and you can see how I placed the modules to get the best range
EDIT: in the house I placed the Core Module wrong vertically. Outdoor test had the Core Module on the car horizontally which is the best position.
https://www.bigclown.com/doc/interfaces/sub-ghz-radio/

Here is the line where you can set number of retransmission:

github.com

bigclownlabs/bcf-sdk/blob/master/bcl/src/bc_radio.c#L14


#include <bc_scheduler.h>
#include <bc_eeprom.h>
#include <bc_i2c.h>
#include <bc_radio_pub.h>
#include <bc_radio_node.h>
#include <math.h>


#define _BC_RADIO_SCAN_CACHE_LENGTH	4
#define _BC_RADIO_ACK_TIMEOUT       100
#define _BC_RADIO_SLEEP_RX_TIMEOUT  100
#define _BC_RADIO_TX_MAX_COUNT      6
#define _BC_RADIO_ACK_SUB_REQUEST   0x11


typedef enum
{
BC_RADIO_STATE_SLEEP = 0,
BC_RADIO_STATE_TX = 1,
BC_RADIO_STATE_RX = 2,
BC_RADIO_STATE_TX_WAIT_ACK = 3,
BC_RADIO_STATE_RX_SEND_ACK = 4,
BC_RADIO_STATE_TX_SEND_ACK = 5,

Martin

eggze · October 2, 2018, 6:27pm

Thanks for the tips, I’ll give it a shot and monitor if it will improve Also I look forward to the improved version of radio layer, it’s always good to remove complex stuff from the code