Witty pi 4 3.7 - wake up problems

What is the state of your Witty Pi 4 L3V7 when you find that it should wake up but does not? Is its red LED still on?

In Witty Pi 4, logs are only written when the Raspberry Pi is powered on, so events after the Raspberry Pi is powered off will not be recorded.

It is off with the white led blinking

@daniel-5014

I noticed the schedule script seems to be run 3 times for every boot, and 2 times happened before the Internet time is applied, why is that? Have you modified the software?

The log says the RTC time has lost or is corrupt during the boot on 2025-06-08, the software first wrote system time (2025-05-30) into RTC, and then did an Internet time synchronization, which correctly set time to 2025-06-08.

Something must happened after 2025-05-30 12:01:09, which caused this issue.

I guess you run shutdown command somewhere to shut down your Pi, because I do not see the "Halting all processes and then shutdown Raspberry Pi..." message in your log. If you pull down GPIO-4 instead of run shutdown command directly, the software can at least record the shutdown event into log. I am not saying this will avoid this kind of issue, but it can provide more information for troubleshooting, at least you will be able to see whether the shutdown has been triggered at an expected time.

Now we do not have such information, I can ony tell something happened after 2025-05-30 12:01:09, and that corrupted the time in RTC, so it can not wake up normally.

Yes, we schedule the next wakeup a few times for fail safe (internet problems, exceptions, etc..), and we run:

system("shutdown now -h")

To finish the run.
Usually on wakeup the logs have the correct time even before getting network time. How can we loose the or corrupt the time and what can be done to fix this?

Posted by: @daniel-5014

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How can we loose the or corrupt the time and what can be done to fix this?

A possible reason is power failure. If the USB-C 5V is disconnected, and the Lithium battery runs out, the RTC time will lose. It may worth the effort to monitor the voltages externally to see if there is a power failure before such issue happens.

Another possible reason is that some software mistakenly writes data to the I2C bus, which happens to be written into the Witty Pi's RTC register.

We are using the JST2.0 3.7 output connector not the the USB-C 5V.
I now have an additional case, testing just 30 minutes ago, the witty wokeup on time sent an image but the witty red light was still on 30 minutes later (The raspberry was not on).
Only by physically disconnecting the battery was I able to turn on the raspberry and get the witty back to normal.
Looking at the logs, again I have a corrupt time. When I turned on again, only after getting internet time was the time updated to correct time.

Can it be an issue with our shutdown? It is important to note that I am testing in a sterile environment the battery hasn't moved at all