Offline outdoor use

Technical Support
1

Good morning

I need to use my RS3D outdoor, without internet connection.
I need to take one hour measurement in a specific location, I will then take the instrument back to home to download my data.

To do that, I did the following operations:

  • At home, with internet connection, I turned the RS3D in offline mode, then switched off.
  • I moved my instrument to the location, and switched on.
  • After one hour I switched off (since no internet was available, I used the direct ssh connection via ethernet using my laptop).
  • When back to home, I switched on the rs3d, realizing that no data were saved.

Turning in offline mode off didn’t help recovering the data. The instrument started again registering data, but the data that I was expecting be registered in offline mode were lost.

How to solve this? Where am I wrong?
I see that the Data producer flag is set to off when in offline mode. Is maybe this the problem?

Thanks for your help

Emanuele

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2

hello,

please forward the log files, without them and any observations we can provide are just guesses.

thanks,
richard

3

RSH.R6BC4.2024-12-04T12_59_40.logs.tar (1.3 MB)

Hello Richard
here the log files newly produced.
The system hadn’t worked as I was expecting from yesterday evening (around 4:30pm UTC, Dec, 3) until this morning (around 8am UTC, Dec, 4). I left it in offline mode during this time, and no data were available during this time.

Thanks
Emanuele

4

hi emanuele,

the problem is that the GPS dongle does not have a lock on enough satellites for the Pi clock to be set properly.
when a GPS dongle is attached, and there is no connection to the internet (i.e., no NTP servers available), data collection will not start until the GPS dongle has made a successful lock and is providing a PPS to shared memory. this PPS is then used as the time source for the NTP daemon.

you can see this in the log file postboot.log

there are two things you can do to handle this situation:

  • getting a better line-of-sight to the sky so that the GPS dongle is able to lock on some satellites successfully
  • if exact timestamps are not critical, disconnect the GPS dongle before the unit is started. in this case, the data-producer program will start just fine, collecting data as you would expect, although having inaccurate timestamps

hope this helps,
richard

1 Like
5

Hello Richard
Thank you, the problem is solved.
The GPS was in fact connected, but the rs3D was in a place where satellites locking is nearly impossible.
Everything worked with the GPS dongle disconnected.

Thank you again
Emanuele

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