Hi all… Hoping someone can help with the strange analog input readings I’m getting.
I have a RPI3b with the automation hat running buster. On it I have three Python programs running that each monitor an input, two digital and one analog. Both digital inputs wait for their events with “if GPIO.wait_for_edge”, and the analog one is polling every 0.25 seconds. When I’m only running the analog reader program I get a fairly constant voltage reading from the analog input, usually within ± 0.1 volts or so. However, when all three python programs are running the analog input reading varies widely. It returns anything from 0.02 up to 4.7 volts on a 5vDC 3.6A power supply. At the same time, a digital multimeter will not vary by more than 0.01 volts normally. I’m hoping someone can help shed some light on what’s going on and possibly a way to resolve this to get a fairly steady reading.
For anyone looking, I ended up getting support on Discord. Nobody replied here. They did help me find an answer. The answer to my problem is the automationhat library cannot handle multiple programs accessing the hardware. I switched mine to using RPI.GPIO everywhere I could and now it’s working fine.
Pimoroni support: It’s frustrating that there is no better way to interact with you than to post somewhere and hope you eventually get a response. My first time user impression of your support channels? Not customer friendly, and would make me hesitate to buy your products in the future even though the products I’ve used thus far were excellent.
Ahoy! Really sorry that we didn’t get back to you here sooner. We hate to disappoint, and sad customers make us sad too 😢 We can only apologise.
Despite our tentacles creeping ever further out into the world, we’re a fairly small crew here in Sheffield, generally with just one person handling several things, and in the case of our support channels, of which there are now a bunch of different ones (here, Twitter, Facebook, Discord, email, etc), we try to juggle those as best we can between us. We dip into the forums periodically and rattle through, tackling as many queries as we can. We’re also really fortunate to have a few really dedicated and knowledgable Pimoroni super-fans like @alphanumeric who go above and beyond for us here, helping out.
If customers have really urgent queries or problems that need a solution, then the quickest and best way is always to email us at support@pimoroni.com, and we’ll usually get back to you within 24 hours. As you’ve found, Discord is also a pretty good way for quick(er) help.
Thanks for your kind words about our products. We’re really glad you like them, and we hope that we can do better with support in the future if you have any trouble. Also thanks for posting the solution here too; that’s really helpful for other customers. Let us know if you order again from us and we’ll pop a few surprises in with your order to say sorry for disappointing. Apologies again.