Powersaving stops espnow bridge from working

[LanWolf]

#1266 Seems to stop the Espnow bridge form working on my Heltec V4 when set to powersaving on.
As soon as I disable powersaving it works again.
Please investigate, thank you.

[IoTThinks]

Yes, correct.
PowerSaving does not mean for heltec_v4_repeater_bridge_espnow yet.

Please do not use "powersaving on" for heltec_v4_repeater_bridge_espnow.
We will put an improvement to detect this case.
Thanks a lot for reporting.

Do you actually need powersaving for heltec_v4_repeater_bridge_espnow?
I think we will have main power for this type of repeater?

[LanWolf]

In case of shtf the bridge is essential to connect 868 to 433, used to connect to other city, in that case it needs to be solar powered, and the 433 and 868 are 10 meters apart.

[IoTThinks]

@LanWolf I'm doing a fix for this now.
I don't use bridge to be frank. :)

Please correct me if I understand correctly your case.

1. So you wire two ESP32-based repeaters via UART.
   Is the UART using pin 17 and 18 or something else?

2. One repeater A will wakeup when there is a LoRa packet.
   Repeater A will send the packet to repeater B via UART cable.
   Is it correct?
   Then they both can have some chances to sleep.

At this moment there are 2 solar powered repeater-bridge setup, they stand about 10 meters apart, and I would like to bridge them. This way we can use 433 to have longer and stable range to a neighbour city, and the 868 will be used locally.
Using mains is not really an option on this location, and I would suppose in a shtf situation bridges and repeaters really need to be on solar, due to brownouts to keep coms going especially to tell the outside world what is going on etc

[LanWolf]

@IoTThinks At this moment I used ESPNOW, I don’t know how long the serial connection can be?

Can’t just string them up straight, would need almost double the length of wire, arround 15-20 meters to run a cable between them, but that is doable.

The repeaters/bridges are doing traffic vise versa not one way. But indeed, if a packer is received on lora, it needs to wake the other on uart or espnow.
Are pin 17/18 the standard pins used in the nightlies for uart on the Heltec v3 and v4 ?
I can hook a pair of wires from an cable up to them, as the boxes have a waterproof utp connection in it which is currently not used.

[IoTThinks]

@LanWolf Ok, I understand.
You do a "virtual" wire via ESPNOW not UART cable.

Btw, currently in dev, there is a PR to skip sleep if a bridge is running. I guess this is not what you want.
You want to have both bridge via ESPNOW and PowerSaving?
Let me see.

[IoTThinks]

I think there is a viable way to on / off ESPNOW.
If there is an active ESPNOW, then skip sleep.
Once done, set ESPNOW to off and sleep.

[IoTThinks]

This has been fixed in #1609
PR 1687 also returns "not supported" for repeaters with bridge.
#1687

So this issue can be closed.

[LanWolf]

Sadly that is not the solution, just turn off sleep when bridging. I understand the espnow cannot work this way, but can the wired uart bridge do sleep ?
Currently a bridge on solar and 3x18650 does not even last 3 days.

[IoTThinks]

@LanWolf I will work on it for PowerSaving 14.

For now just make sure the PR1687 will response correctly "not supported" for bridge first.

Espnow has sleep mode too.
But may not as good as LoRa RX.

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