Sometimes sensor doesn't handle MDS requests - movesense

I'm working with Movesense 2.0.0 on a HR+ sensor and the latest MDSlib for Android.
I have an App that calls my custom WB services to download some data stored on sensor's EEPROM.
It happens that sometimes (once every few hundred calls, not always on the same endpoint and when it happens it keeps doing it for a few subsequent requests) sensor's requests handler is not called, and I get this messages from debugger:
ERROR: SF-N invalid CRC
ERROR: SF-N frame too short
ERROR: SF-N invalid CRC
Usually if I send the request again after a few seconds it's correctly handled.
I also tried sending hundreds of thousands of requests from wbcmd through serial port, but the error never appeared.
Is there something I can look at to troubleshoot this issue?

The CRC error indicates that the datapipe experienced dropping or incorrect data, which was caught by the whiteboard protocol CRC checks. Corruption usually happens when the radio link is on the verge of dropping completely and there really is not much that can be done.
You can read the radio link RSSI value (signal strength) in both iOS and Android to see bad the connection is. Most of the time I don't bother. Easier just to retry failed operations later.
Full Disclaimer: I work for the Movesense team

Related

CBPeripheral being disconnected with UnknownError Code=0 after calling writeValue

I'm developing an app that uses Bluetooth to communicate with Smart Devices.
It needs to authorise iPhone with such scheme:
Scanning devices with some filters of services UUIDs
Connecting to a device, discovering services, discovering characteristics
Calling read operation to retrieve public keys
Exchange received public keys (using ECDH)
Generate token
Write encrypted token (using AES) to device using writeValue
That's all, after that I have stable connection and able to interact with my Smart Device (writing values to protected properties).
The question is that when I restart my app and do all of the steps above, except Step_5 (because I have my token generated and validated previous time), on Step_6 delegate method didWriteValueFor: doesn't even get called, instead of this delegate method didDisconnectPeripheral being called with Error Domain=CBErrorDomain Code=0 "Unknown error." UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Unknown error.} and I can't write values to protected characteristics.
I can't get what I'm doing wrong. Any help would be nice.
UPD[0]: Sometimes I can get a callback for didWriteValueFor: on Step_6 but IMMEDIATELY (like less than a 0.5 sec) iPhone is being disconnected with an error from above.
UPD[1]: Also I was trying to cancelPeripheralConnection() before closing my app because Smart Device does not handle multiple connections in hardware reasons, but no luck here.
UPD[2]: Well, after three days of searching for information, I realized that I was digging in the wrong direction at all. The problem was that I interrupted the application with the “Stop” button in Xcode, and didn’t close it manually via iPhone, therefore, willTerminate was not called, and even if it was called, it had a very limited amount of time to execute all the processes that were supposed to be executed, as a result, the connection didn’t interrupt (the cancelPeripheralConnection method was not called), and the next time I started the App, I tried to establish a connection with a device that already has a connection to my App.
At least it started connecting often, but I'm still getting this error sometimes. The main question is: how properly disconnect from the device? For now I’m unsubscribing from all the properties that have isNotify: true (setting to false) and call cancelPeripheralConnection. Do I need to wait the “unsubscribe” process before disconnecting?
UPD[3]: It doesn't matter if I wait for unsubscribe finished or not. At least it have no effect.
Well, I found the reason why disconnects are appears:
Since Smart Device has several characteristics of public keys that need to be read, encrypted and then sent back, the order keys I read and write was important. Since writeValue and readValue are asynchronous, my order went astray. As soon as I began to keep order, everything worked like a clock.

Can too many WSASend in short time be a problem?

I'm making a simple mmorpg server with IOCP.
I implemented a simple movement function so I tested with dummy clients(also IOCP).
Everything works fine only when few clients are connected. After around 500~1000 clients are connected, some dummy clients occasionally read weird data. I checked that server sends data as I expected but when it comes to dummy clients reading them, they read random data.
My guess is that it could be related to operation system's recv buffer being overflowed but I'm only guessing right now... I have no idea how to check them.
Any suggestion would be very thankful!
The problem with too many WSASends doesn't usually manifest as corrupted data; that's more likely to be a bug in your code. Perhaps your problem is caused by you failing to manage the lifetime of the buffer that is being used to send data correctly? It needs to stay stable until you get the completion for the WSASend call. If you were reusing it sooner than that then you would corrupt the data being sent.
The reason this may show up when you have lots of WSASends outstanding to lots of clients is that the send operations may be taking longer to complete and so make it more likely that your bug will be hit...
It doesn't matter how many WSASends you issue as long as your clients are able to receive the data as fast as you can send it. As soon as you are sending faster than they can receive then there will be problems. I address these problems in this answer.

Rate limiting Airbrake Javascript logs

I have followed the instructions available at https://github.com/airbrake/airbrake-js to allow for JS exceptions to be farmed out to Airbrake.
What I am wondering is - is there a way to intercept these exceptions BEFORE that are sent to Airbrake? I want to limit messages sent over the wire to Airbrake as it's not looking to good in the console when we start getting MANY 503 responses with the old message of "You've performed too many requests"
We're currently re-writing our Javascript notifier. This will be one of the features of the updated notifier. Watch this space.
Ben

How to tell the difference between an offline and online mobile phone via sip?

For a toy project I want to find out if a mobile phone is connected to gsm or not. So I thought "Okay, let's use my local sip provider and see".
But in both cases, the thing goes like this:
I send an INVITE
0 s: I get a 100 Trying
5 s: I get a 183 Session description
I get an audio stream, in the one case with the ringing, in the other case with a "The person you are calling is…"
If I wait long enough (~ 40 s), I get a more appropiate status code like 180 Ringing.
Audio analysis is not an option, really.
Any hints on where to go now?
(I used twinkle for testing and a local german sip-provider.)
This issue is endemic in the way telephone networks work, and is not specific to SIP or IP. It's why, when you place a call to another country and the number is busy, you might sometimes hear your local country's busy tone, or you might hear a different busy tone that comes from the other country. In the latter case you cannot detect except by audio analysis, what the problem is. In SS7 and ISDN we speak of Q.931 cause codes instead of SIP error codes, but the principle is the same.
There's an argument to be made for configuring telephone systems to emit status codes instead of audio error messages. For callers using normal phones, the originating switch (the one closest to the caller) can then map that code to the appropriate spoken error message or audio tone. That way, when the call is being placed by software rather than by a person, the software can have access to the actual error code right away.
On the other hand you can also argue for having the remote switch (the one nearest the destination or the one that encounters the problem) speak its own error message. That switch knows best what the actual problem is. For example, a mobile operator can emit a spoken error message saying that the mobile phone you are trying to call is currently out of range. There is no Q.931 code (or SIP error code for that matter) with that meaning. It could return 27=Destination out of order?? Or 35=Destination unattainable?? Both of those codes are so esoteric, who knows what error message the local switch would translate them to (in practice: probably just a reorder tone, which is really user-unfriendly to a human caller). And when you try to map Q.931 cause codes to SIP error codes back and forth, even more information is lost because the codes really don't match up well at all. It's likely to be a much better user experience for the caller if the remote switch just plays back an informative, appropriate, recording which describes the problem.
Since there is this dilemma (arguments on both sides), we can conclude that this will not likely be resolved by completely standardizing on one way or ther other way anytime soon.
Anyway, sometimes this is configurable: your SIP provider may be able to configure your trunk for coded errors instead of recorded messages. If they offer this (some do), it's worth a try to set this option. But results will vary: this option only affects its local behaviour. In general if you want immediately call clearing with cause code and are instead getting a recorded error message from the other end, you will not be able to do anything about it, because the switch that makes the decision on which way it's going to respond is the remote one.
When using the audio message method, a proper Q.931 cause code or SIP error code usually comes eventually (after the recording is finished), but as you point out, it's probably too late by then.

What does 8badf00d mean?

Sometimes my iPhone application crashes with a weird crashlog, that reads exception code is 0x8badf00d. The stacktraces show random snapshots of app execution, but nothing suspicious. This happens very rarely and I'm not able to find out how to reproduce it. Does anybody know more about this kind of exception and exception code?
Here is an excerpt from my crashlogs:
Exception Type: 00000020
Exception Codes: 0x8badf00d
Highlighted Thread: 0
Application Specific Information:
Failed to deactivate
Thread 0:
...
< nothing suspicious here >
...
Unknown thread crashed with unknown flavor: 5, state_count: 1
0x8badf00d is the error code that the watchdog raises when an application takes too long to launch or terminate. See Apple's Crash Reporting for iPhone OS Applications document
If you get Exception Type: 00000020 and Exception Codes: 0x8badf00d then it is watchdog timeout crash reports. The exception code 0x8badf00d is called "ate bad food".
The most common reason for this crash is synchronous activity on main thread. The fix is to switch to asynchronous activity on main thread.
Refer this Apple document for more detail.
It is HexSpeak, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak
It's some programmer's idea of a joke. You have to pick a number for your code, but the number doesn't necessarily mean anything in itself. 8badf00d is just another way to write the number 2,343,432,205, and was chosen because it looks 'funny' when represented in hex for an exception log.
0x8badf00d exception is raised by apple provided watchdog. The most common cause for watchdog timeout crashes in a network application is synchronous networking on the main thread. There are four contributing factors here:
synchronous networking — This is where you make a network request and block waiting for the response.main thread — Synchronous networking is less than ideal in general, but it causes specific problems if you do it on the main thread. Remember that the main thread is responsible for running the user interface. If you block the main thread for any significant amount of time, the user interface becomes unacceptably unresponsive.long timeouts — If the network just goes away (for example, the user is on a train which goes into a tunnel), any pending network request won't fail until some timeout has expired. Most network timeouts are measured in minutes, meaning that a blocked synchronous network request on the main thread can keep the user interface unresponsive for minutes at a time.Trying to avoid this problem by reducing the network timeout is not a good idea. In some situations it can take many seconds for a network request to succeed, and if you always time out early then you'll never make any progress at all.watchdog — In order to keep the user interface responsive, iOS includes a watchdog mechanism. If your application fails to respond to certain user interface events (launch, suspend, resume, terminate) in time, the watchdog will kill your application and generate a watchdog timeout crash report. The amount of time the watchdog gives you is not formally documented, but it's always less than a network timeout.
There are two common solutions:
asynchronous networking — The best solution to this problem is to run your networking code asynchronously. Asynchronous networking code has a number of advantages, not least of which is that it lets you access the network safely without having to worry about threads.synchronous networking on a secondary thread — If it's prohibitively difficult to run your networking code asynchronously (perhaps you're working with a large portable code base that assumes synchronous networking), you can avoid the watchdog by running your synchronous code on a secondary thread.
Refer apple docs for more information.
It's a failure code added by a dev with a good sense of humor. Because hexadecimal uses letters as well as numbers, it's possible to come up with hex numbers that look approximately like english words, such as "0xdeadbeef", etc. I'm sure that the exception has a specific meaning, but if there's no major symptoms associated with it, you can probably ignore it without too much concern.
from wikipedia 0xBAADF00D ("bad food") is used by Microsoft's LocalAlloc(LMEM_FIXED) to indicate uninitialised allocated heap memory when the debug heap is used.[7]