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Want to eliminate the battery ritual?

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joe:
Scott,

Yep it is a baindaid no argument there but
look , this battery thing has been around as
long as the CM15A and no fix from X10 so
sometimes you gotta take the bull by the
horns. Maybe the design engineer at X10 will
read this and have an epiphany, learn to put
reset circuitry in it next time!

Joe

carmine pacifico:
Maybe if the design engineer at X10 had any
brain he would use the Watchdog reset(WDR)
instruction within the chip and self reset
the CM15a when his firmware hangs,
eliminating the need to power cycle the
micro-controller.

joe:
Carmine, if they did that, it would just hang
when the reset occured, all the RAM would get
initialized. There is no way to reload unless
it is hooked to a PC.

Joe

carmine pacifico:
Joe

Reload what?
Macros are stored in external EE_prom, only
the clock need to be reloaded,
During a WDR reset the internal ram is
intact, this means the clock is just
stopped.
Their reset routine should interrogate
the “Processor status and Control Register”,
If a WDR reset proceed without resetting
Clock, at the most the CM15a would loose 1
second or 2.
From Micro-Controller data sheet:
10.0 Reset
The USB Controller supports three types of
resets. The effects
of the reset are listed below. The reset
types are:
1. Low-voltage Reset (LVR)
2. Brown Out Reset (BOR)
3. Watchdog Reset (WDR)
The occurrence of a reset is recorded in
the Processor Status
and Control Register (Figure 20-1). Bits 4
(Low-voltage or
Brown-out Reset bit) and 6 (Watchdog Reset
bit) are used to
record the occurrence of LVR/BOR and WDR
respectively.
The firmware can interrogate these bits to
determine the cause
of a reset.

roger1818:
Carmine:  I suspect (though I don’t know
for sure) that they are using the Watchdog
reset.  The problem is the Watchdog will
only cause a reset if CPU hangs
completely.  This often isn’t the case.
Since same CPU is used for composing &
interpreting powerline commands, composing
& interpreting RF commands, maintaining the
clock (for timed events), and talking to
the USB port.  I have never noticed all of
these not working at the same time.  I have
had one or more of them stop working while
others continue to work.  If any of these
still work, the CPU must still be running
and the watchdog would not trigger a reset.

I don’t know why some would stop working
while others continue to work, but that
seems to be what happens.  Regardless of
the cause, a reset seems to get everything
to work again.  With the diagnostic unit,
the only thing I have had stop working is
USB communications.

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