Sotacat

Equipment Radios & Power
1

Original Question:

I built the SotaCat adapter, but my radio didn’t respond at all. Do I need to enable anything? I couldn’t find any relevant information.

Answer: There’s nothing to enable on the KX2.

Brian (@AB6D) and I discussed the hardware details. For my first test, I used an ESP C3 super mini that I had at home. After resolving some initial issues, it worked fine.

However, Brian mentioned that the single-core version of the C3 might run into problems during transmission due to its single-core architecture. So, I’m assuming we should go for the S3 version instead?

Is that correct, Brian?

-Julian

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@IN3JIB

For the benefit of others, here are SOTACAT debugging steps to go through:

  • Did you load the latest firmware into the ESP32-C3 from the SOTACAT – SOTAmāt page over a USB cable (first time) or OTA (over the air, subsequent times)? Did the firmware loading succeed or was there an error?
    • If there was an error, did you use a USB charging cable or a USB data cable? It needs to be a data cable.
  • If you got the firmware loaded, what happens when you turn the device on? Do the LED’s flash? If so, describe the sequence or share a few seconds of video.
  • Are you using an iOS or Android phone to connect to it?
    • On your phone do you see the SOTACAT’s WiFi (SSID will start with SOTACAT_xxxx)
    • Did it accept the password “12345678”?
  • If connected, on the phone can you open the web page of the device by going to:
    • iOS: “http://sotacat.local”
    • Android: “192.168.4.1” (or follow the instructions on the web site SOTACAT – SOTAmāt) since there are so many flavors of Android and most don’t support Bonjour out-of-the-box.
  • Once connected, did you navigate to the “Settings” page and program your WiFi settings? Did you then reboot and connect as the instructions describe?
  • After rebooting did you see a list of SOTA activations and POTA activations on the different tabs?

Another debugging tool is to connect to the device to a computer via USB and look at the console logging output from the SOTACAT.

You must use a browser that supports the Web Serial protocol (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, etc.). Firefox does not yet implement Web Serial and will not work.

First click on the “Connect to SOTACAT via USB” button:
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Next select your device from the list: in this example it is USB JTAG/serial debug unit (COM11):

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Then click on “Logs & Console”:

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And then you can see what is happening with your device and you can use “Reset Device” to reboot it and see the communication that happens right from the start of the boot process.

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Note that since the hardware and firmware are open source, there are different hardware versions out there as K5EM has built a sweet custom PCB and kit for it. The current firmware should sense which hardware revision you have and adjust. However, you are using a slightly different version of the ESP32 than what we have developed on and the timings might not work correctly. Happy to help you debug. If you are a software developer, you should try and build the firmware directly from source code (in Github) so that you can build a Debug version that has a lot of extra console logging output. If you are not a software developer it might be easier for me to build you a Debug version of the firmware.

73 de AB6D - Brian

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@IN3JIB From your earlier message it sounds like you are having trouble building the Debug version of the firmware from the source code in Github. The error seems related to external dependencies on other libraries.

I suspect you cloned the repository but might not have cloned the submodule dependencies. You’ll want to do something like:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:SOTAmat/SOTAcat.git
git submodule init
git submodule update

If that isn’t the problem, let me know.

73 de AB6D - Brian

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SO downloading manually from github works.

Cloning doesn’t.
image

73
Julian

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That error just means you don’t have a trusted SSH connection to Github. You can use the https method instead:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/SOTAmat/SOTAcat.git

-Brian

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Work like a charm!

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So @AB6D today I soldered the SEEED ESP C3 together and gave it a try.
Same behavior as with the other. There is some timing issue.

I’m running currently the APP from playstore but I saw, that you have released a new one with 2.xx but its only .abb so I can’t install it on my android phone. Can you upload pls the APK version?

THX
Julian

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I am still working on a new version of SOTAMAT with updated SOTACAT handling. I will upload APK and Play Store AAB versions at the next release. There will still be some edge-case bugs between the SOTACAT and the SOTAMAT that won’t be fixed in that release, but the bugs are more of an annoyance and easily worked around (race conditions between changes made on the radio and changes made in the app: there are situations where it is hard to tell which mode and frequency is the user’s intent when they disagree).

I have posted a new firmware for the SOTACAT on the site. SOTACAT – SOTAmāt

-Brian AB6D

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Perfect!
Thx a lot and thx for u work!

73
Julian

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