BLE and WiFi together about esphome-victron_ble

[Fabian-Schmidt]

Hi,
This is a tricky problem. I don't think this issue is related to the victron integration as it uses a common pattern used by ESPHome and nobody has reported this issue.

Without a dump of the error it is hard to identify the cause. Possible root causes (outside of a software bug) are:

• Running out of memory. Happens very easily when using a display.
• Processor too busy. Happens sometimes when display is used.
• Hardware bug. Seen some ESP devices which are just tired.

You can try the following:

• Disable logging by setting level: None. Logging is blocking operation in ESPHome and I have seen it causing unusual behavior. Especially on high volume levels like debug or verbose.
• Disable the display. If it causes issues you might need to decrease the refresh rate and increase the data rate.

If you connect and flash the ESP device via USB then it should be possible to collect more details when it crashes to identify the root cause.

Cheers,
Fabian

[captain324]

Thanks for your comments, I'll give it another try ...

FWIW, I remember having issues with wifi stability before I added any code to enable the display. I'll go back to that and capture some of the log reports.

The board that I'm using has 16M of RAM, I did not think I was running out of memory from the errors I saw. I also tried several delayed start of BLE schemes without success such as those suggested here ... esphome/issues#2941 (comment)

Using Arduino IDE and the example from https://github.com/hoberman/Victron_BLE_Advertising_example plus some wifiseriallite code, BLE and wifi was rock solid. This didn't get my Victron data into HA but did point a finger at ESPHome.

[Fabian-Schmidt]

All ESP32 have 384kb ram. You have additional 16mb PSRam. This additional psram is slow and can only be used for some things. Its not like a normal x86 computer. To use this psram you must add psram to the esphome yaml. Or else it will not use it.
See https://esphome.io/components/psram.html

Edit: I don't think you have 16MB psram. The classic ESP32 only supports 4MB psram maximum. You have 16MB Flash!

[captain324]

To close this out, my board has 16MB of Flash ...

Chip is ESP32-D0WD-V3 (revision v3.0)
Features: WiFi, BT, Dual Core, 240MHz, VRef calibration in efuse, Coding Scheme None
Crystal is 40MHz
MAC: 8c:4b:14:x:x:x
Auto-detected Flash size: 16MB

WiFi became stable when I removed the display code. There was no need to disable logging.

Thanks for the help!