Troubleshooting and known issues¶

General suggestions¶

A laptop or another machine running Thonny is essential for debugging issues when setting up the door opener. I personally have a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W running VNC that I can connect to and check the console output.
Wireless signal strength was a fairly consistent source of issues for me early on until I set up an additional wireless access point in a mesh configuration. The MQTT client library used is to some extent resilient to connection issues and attempts to maintain the connection but having a strong signal to start with will save you some frustration.

LED pulsing on open/close is deliberately disabled when the door opener is running in web server mode as this results in a crash due to the limited stack size of the Pico. I’ve raised other issues with the underlying picozero library used in the project that haven’t been addressed, so I’m unsure if this can be rectified.
I feel this project is pushing at the limits of the capabilities of the Pico in terms of resources, being implemented in a polymorphic object-oriented manner and making extensive use of third party libraries. I had to cross-compile the libraries into native bytecode to allow everything to fit into memory, and the project would probably benefit from a rewrite in a lower level language such as C (no plans currently to do that).