si_tyler
@twilson · Joined March 2026
System integrator · energy · 15 years in the field
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One thing from the field: make the command set a state, never toggle. A command that times out only means no answer came back, it may have run anyway. If the supervisor presses again, fan.set on twice is harmless, fan.toggle twice turns it off.
I thought there was a “send report” option on dashboards?
I run about thirty of these little gateways on substations, same pattern.
Overlay on for the root filesystem, yes. Do your RaspAP changes with the overlay switched off, reboot, switch it back on. Annoying but rare.
The buffer needs a place that survives reboots and power loss: a second partition on the card (or a USB stick) mounted read-write with ext4 and its journal, outside the overlay. Point SQLite there, with PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL and synchronous=NORMAL. A cut then costs you at most the last few writes, not the database. Move mosquitto’s persistence there too, or turn persistence off since your forwarder already buffers.
On Rachel’s question: yes, if you stamp each reading with ts in UTC milliseconds when the ESP sends it (only if the Pi’s clock is synced, which it is once 4G is up, and keep a fake-hwclock so it isn’t 1970 after a power cut). Send the backlog in batches per child:
{"esp-bed3": [{"ts": 1767254400000, "values": {"soil_pct": 41}},
{"ts": 1767254460000, "values": {"soil_pct": 41}}]}Records land at their own time in history. A message whose every record is older than a minute counts as a replay and has to fit the profile’s replay rate, so a long backlog drains over a while. Don’t panic when it doesn’t all appear in one second. And wait for the PUBACK before deleting rows. See Devices behind a gateway.
That’s it then. A Pi 3 has no real time clock. At boot it restores the time it saved at the last clean shutdown (fake-hwclock) and then waits for NTP. Your lab network blocks NTP (UDP 123), so the clock stays in the past, and to the TLS library the server certificate isn’t valid yet. Seen this on half the field Pis I’ve commissioned behind locked-down firewalls.
Fixes, pick one:
# 1. ask IT for the internal NTP server and use it
sudo nano /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf
[Time]
NTP=ntp.your-lab.example
sudo systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd
timedatectl # "System clock synchronized: yes"
# 2. if only 443 is open: sync from HTTPS headers
sudo apt install htpdate
sudo htpdate -s https://www.example.orgUndo the hardcoded IP. The broker needs SNI, so connect by host name, and the certificate is checked against that name anyway, which is why you got the mismatch. Plain client.tls_set() with the system CA bundle is fine; Tyler, no client certificate is needed for token logins, the server asks for one but doesn’t require it.
Also make the script wait for a synced clock before connecting, otherwise a reboot in the lab breaks it again. A quick loop on timedatectl show -p NTPSynchronized works. See the TLS section of MQTT.
On the bench both power supplies share mains earth, so the “isolated” sides are probably closer to each other than you think through supply capacitance.