Red LED Blinking, not syncing messages

Whenever I power on my MCU and Blues Card (NOTE-NBNA-500 on Notecarrier-B) on my custom PCB board, the blues card shows the Red LED blinks every second or so and then switches to every 2 sec (on for blip) while the Green LED is on and blips off every 2 seconds. This sequence switches back and forth. While scoping the UART line, the only thing I notice is that the ‘total’ keeps incrementing per file, and does not seem to be sending, despite explicit sync messages and periodic syncs set to every minute. I am especially seeing this on notecard with FW version (1.5.6.13782) where as ones with version (1.5.5.13080) only do it for some short amount of time before going to their usual functionality. What does the red blinking mean, and why is the notecard not sending up the notefiles?

Hey @abar2437,

Sorry you’re running into some issues.

It’s normal for Notecard’s red LEDs to blink on startup, and when the Notecard is sending or receiving JSON. Here’s more details on what the LED lights mean: https://discuss.blues.com/t/what-do-the-notecard-led-blink-patterns-mean.

For troubleshooting the notes not sending, you might want to start by updating the firmware to the latest 3.3.1 release to see if that helps: Notecard Firmware Updates - Blues Wireless Developers.

You can also try connecting to the Notecard Playground and issuing a sync-trace command, as that’ll run a hub.sync request with a bit of extra debugging turned on, which might help us figure out what’s going on.

Hopefully this helps. If not let us know and we’ll see what we can do to get you back up and running.

TJ

Hi @abar2437,

The frequency of your “periodic” syncs is quite high, and by coupling that with explicit sync messages you may be overwhelming the Notecard.

There are multiple strategies for syncing Notes to Notehub, but when all the strategies are used together, then you must be thoughtful in your approach.

Based on how you’re using the Notecard above, it sounds as though your explicit sync message is enough to synchronize your Notes with Notehub, so the periodic sync would largely be unnecessary. So you can safely reduce the frequency of your periodic syncs and think of them only as a fail safe (I would at least extend the period to 5 minutes, but realistically set it MUCH further out).

Finally, one thing that gets me sometimes, is that I end up disturbing the uFL connector and the antenna becomes unknowingly detached. Then Notes pile up (like you are seeing), and I am unable to sync with Notehub.

Hopefully this advice along with TJ’s insight will help you get unstuck.

Best,
Zak

1 Like