Help needed for a RF Sender Receiver System

[AndreasR]

Dear Forum and dear guys from Matrix Staff.
Following situation is givven.

I build a Sender / Receiver System based on the RF Modules EB063.
8 Sender Units including 4 Buttons placed in a laboratory to call 1 of 4 technicians.
The location of a specific sender is hard coded.
The Code which is sent is a two digit number. First digit is the hard coded location (1 to 8 ). Second digit is the pressed button (1 to 4)
For example 12 is the code for department 1 button 2.
6 Receiver Units are used to give information to the technicians.
The information is:
A call is placed -> Buzzer beeps
Who calls -> LCD shows the department (AV1 - AV8 at line one and the name of the technician at line two
One of 4 colored High Power LEDs shows a color code depending of the name of the technician ( Yellow > Name 1, Green > Name two etc)
After two minutes the LCD and the LED is reset.
Within the 2 minutes showtime a buffer should store new calls to be show after reset of the LCD / LED
Its a kind of many to many system, because one call should be shown on all receivers.


Sender is quite simple:
A PIC 16F88, 4 Buttons, an LED and a RXTX Chip from RF Solutions.
It sends a code dependend of the pressed button .
Circuit works well.

Receiver is a bit complexer:
A Pic 16F887, a 2x16 Char LCD, 4 colored signal LEDs, a piezo buzzer and again a RXTX Chip from RF-Solutions.
Details see the attached PDF.
Most times the circuit works well again, but i have some very strange phenomena.

All Sender units are NOT plugged in (they have no power):
After some hours rhe receiver units show real informations like anyone has pressed a button on a sender unit.
I have build 6 Receiver Systems. Sometimes only one sometimes two or three receivers showing messages.
All coding options in the RFdeclaration part like sync pattern bandwidth etc are used.
Next phenomenon is:
All 8 Sender Units and 6 Receiver Units are active.
All works fine.
After some time the receiver showing messages although no key is pressed on a sender unit.
This builds up.
The only solution is to switch of the power on all receiver and all sender units and start again.

I hope my declarations are not to unknowable and anybody has an idea.

@Matrix Staff
Ben asks in 2006

what you are doing with flowcode

Is this such a project?

Greetings from showery germany
Andreas

[Benj]

Hello Andreas,

Yes this sounds like a great project to shout about.

You could maybe try using the send packet and check for packet routines rather then the send and receive byte routines and see if there is any noticeable difference.

For v5 the component code has been updated to allow for extra CRC checking on all received data so you can be sure your data is valid. I will see if I can spend some time and get the v4 component more up to scratch too.

[AndreasR]

Hi Ben,
ok nice to hear that my small project is not ready for trash
Flowcode is great
But...
You say i should try to use the packet routines.
Is it possible that in spite of sync pattern noise or dirt from other RF Systems is the reason?
I´m not sure that there is a strange source having the ability to send a decimal number in the range of 11 to 84 and exactly match the sync pattern.
And that not only statistically one time a month but rather one or more times a day or hour.
Andreas

[AndreasR]

Please dear fellows help me!
After some Tests i´m sure that the "strange phenomena" is not noise from other RF Components.
It is a bug in my code.
But where is the bug
The routines are quite simple but i have no idea where to modify.
Andreas