DC sonic boom - missed opportunity -> Watchdog update?

After hearing about yesterday’s sonic boom in the DC area (my neck of the woods), I was excited to run to my Shake and Boom to see what was captured. As luck would have it, I discovered my device went offline for nearly 4 hrs. during that time, failing to capture the event. . Rebooting restored it and data is once again flowing.

While infrequent, this has happened several times now, which is quite frustrating. I’m not aware of any ISP interruptions, as I was watching streaming movies on another device the entire time. A quick search of this forum resulted in a few (dated) references about implementing a cron job or watchdog timer. The most recent reference I could find was from 2021 that referenced a defwg.wordpress article from 2017 for a generic RPi implementation, along with several caveats. The upshot of that paper was to play around with different settings, in other words, YMMV.

Despite the dated reference, it this still the current, most elegant solution to consider? Should the good RS folks consider implementing an ready-out-of-box way to automate detection and reboot the sensor to such “no notice and no alerting there’s a problem” sudden connectivity interruptions?

Regards…Mpan

Hello mpan,

If this is a situation that happens more or less frequently, and, as you said, it should not depend on your internet provider, there may be something that needs investigation in the processes of the Shake itself.

To help with this, when you have the chance, can you download and post the logs from your Shake here so that I can take a look? If needed, instructions on how to do so can be found on this page: Please read before posting!

Thank you!

I also had a similar issue last night. I cleaned around my shake, and shut it down, but it never came back up, and I never noticed. I found out this morning when I realized there was no trace of the Japan earthquake. I run an ADSB receiver for Piaware and several other services, all of which have some selection in their configs to notify me via e-mail if the device stops reporting. What is preventing this from happening for Shakes? I really would not like to have collection gaps.