WS-8-250-DC get's stuck in hibernation.

[patagonia]

I have a Netonix WS-8-250-DC that won't wake up when it goes into hibernation. Board rev D, firmware 1.4.7. PSU rev A, firmware 28.

We used this switch on our very first repeater bringing internet to our house. It was a welcome improvement over the previous AC inverter + toughswitch kludge but had the pesky problem of getting stuck in hibernation. It would reliably happen every time the battery discharged below the threshold. I would have posted about it on the forums but noticed an entry in the release notes that seemed to indicate this problem was fixed. We retired that repeater soon afterwards so I never got to see if the fix actually worked.

Fast-forward to 2 weeks ago and we are using the switch on our main repeater that serves my house and some paying customers. We had some unusually heavy snow and bam, the old problem reared it's head again. I had to hike 30 minutes through the aforementioned snow to reach the repeater and reset it. I just disconnected power for 10 seconds, reconnected, and everything was fine. I immediately updated to the latest firmware.

Last week it happened again. Seems we will need a heftier power system for the mountain but that is beside the point. I realize the WS-250-DC is EOL but I really need it to work. Can anything be done?

Here is a screenshot of the status page taken while the switch was still operational. I will hike back to the tower later today to reset the switch and can post additional screenshots once that's done.

[sirhc]

Your firmware is over a year old

v1.4.7 released Sun May 07, 2017 1:40 pm

First try upgrading the firmware, current version is v1.5.0
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=240#p848

[patagonia]

Thanks for your quick reply sirhc. I upgraded to 1.5.0 after the first outage, but it went down again a couple of days later. I'm writing this from the repeater where I found the exact same problem. Just power cycle on the switch and everything was good to go.

I've attached a screenshot of the power page. Based on some other forum posts it looks like I maybe should bump the wakeup voltage to 27v and the warning voltage to 26.

[Stephen]

After investigating, it appears that this switch model was built with a DC power supply bootloader version that at the time could not updated the power supply firmware. So even though you've updated to the latest firmware for the switch, the power supply firmware refuses the upgrade since the upgrade process was not functional at that time.

Please keep in mind this switch was from our first batch of SMART DC switches and was MFG way back on 08/20/2015. Later releases of the WS-8-250-DC had an improved bootloader that allowed the power supply firmware to be upgraded. Sadly there are about 200 units out there with this bootloader on them. You can tell if you have one because no matter what version of firmware you put on the switch the power supply firmware will remain version 28 and not upgrade with the switch firmware.

To help with your issue you can RMA your switch to us and we will update the power supply microcontroller (bootloader) with the latest code so that it performs correctly allowing the power supply firmware to be upgraded.