Hello! We are using sgV2-software on our RPis located in remote areas without cell service/Internet access. We have trouble downloading data through the software after the station has been running for several month without any download. Data download can take 30-45 minutes (via download button AND download all button), sometimes creating an error. Any advice or “good practice” to do in those cases? Removing SD card manually and deleting SGData? Thanks!
Camille, my practice with V1 SGs was always to travel to stations with empty, formatted SD cards which I would swap with the filled card in the SD. This should still work for the V2 software, but maybe someone else can chime in. Just be sure to confirm data is present on the card you pull out and that your station is running normally with the new card before walking away. This way you don’t have to wait for long downloads in the field. One or two spare SD cards is usually enough, since you are constantly pulling data and resetting a card for the next field trip.
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Thank you Todd! Indeed, we do the same thing with BBBK and SG-v1, but I was hoping there would be another way of doing this with sg-V2. With BBBK, we can simply change the SD card without having to reimage the SD card or having multiple reimaged SD cards, which is very useful for our remote collaborators that are less familiar with Motus, RPi, etc. If there’s no other way to do this with SG-v2, then we’ll keep doing it the old way ;) Thanks a lot!
I’ve actually been using FileZilla again. It allows you to browse the folder structure so you can be sure you’re downloading what what you need and nothing more, and it’s a quicker (or at least you can see the progress). Then I use the web UI for the logs. With a 32 or 64 gb card, it should be a long time before you actually need to delete the existing data.
But I also do what Todd does and bring extra SD cards, ideally with the software already on them (but not configured) so you can swap them in if you need to update the software. It sure feels like a long time to wait if you have to flash them at the site - like I am doing right now! - though I suppose you can also use that time to respond to messages while you wait :)
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Couple of questions:
- how strong is the wifi signal? how far away is your phonelaptop from the SG (how many walls are in between)?
- what do the errors say?
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- how much data is there to download?
You could restart the SG before the download and see whether that helps. Also make sure you have a good wifi connection.
I am the person who went to download the data and encountered this issue. The Wi-Fi signal was at full strength, there were no walls, I was just a few centimeters from the SG, and I didn’t receive any error messages — the data simply wouldn’t download, whether I used my computer or my phone. There were 500Mb of data to download that time. I tried turning the device off and on again, without success. One frustrating aspect is that the download started initially using “Download Data,” but the file ended up empty and the data was no longer available for download. I then tried downloading using “Download All.” Eventually, I removed the SD card to download the data manually. Could it be that the microSD card isn’t powerful enough?
I hope this helps.
The issue is not the SDcard, it’s probably an incompatibility with the browser. Josh has had problems as well, it’s just that without error messages I don’t quite know where to start. Which OS and browser did you use?
I also tried several browser without success (Firefox, Microsoft edge and Chrome).
Did you wipe/reuse the SDcard after retrieving it? If it’s still around somewhere, the content of /var/logs might tell me what happened. If you have a linux or Mac you should be able to insert it and mount the second partition. (Or boot an rpi and soon SSH in to tar/zip up /var/logs)
One thing I’ve noticed is that, where is a lot of data to download, it can take quite a while to prepare and zip the data for download. Now that I know that, I know to be patient, but previously I just assumed it was failing since I hadn’t given it enough time.
For the most part these days, I use FileZilla. It’s a familiar process since the old SG data used to be downloaded this way, and there is the added benefit of being able to view/select precisely the data desired.
I reused it and only removed the data needed. We may be able to send you the content of /var/logs.
I response to jsrs, we waited an hour next to it, I think it is pretty long ;)