ESP8266 Community Forum

I am trying to make a WS2812 driver for the ESP8266 and I'm having unusual rebooting issues. If I try to disable interrupts for too long with os_intr_lock();/os_intr_unlock(); it simply goes off into la la land and reboots. No idea why, though. Also, it's not always the same timing. Sometimes I can send to 40 WS2812's for a while, other times to 100 for a little bit before a crash. It seems to have to do with if some other interrupts come in. Any ideas?

P.S.
https://github.com/cnlohr/ws2812esp8266

There may be a watchdog timer in the system. It the watchdog interrupt doesn't get acked after XXX seconds the system reboots. It is a safety precaution against the system getting locked up. Quite common on embedded chips.

Added -- the way the interrupt doesn't get acked is if your code goes off into the weeds and gets locked up somehow.

Cnlohr, thanks for working on this

Could the crash also be induced by some not cleared memory buffers?

That is very possible. Since longer waits only increase the probability of a crash, there is no hard cut off... It would seem to me that's a reasonable possibility. I am starting to think this processor may still be best if paired up with an AVR as a dedicated IO processor. Probably still too early to know for sure. People are likely to find a lot of hacks to get around limitations.