[Ovmsdev] Spewing Vehicle Alerts

[Tom Saxton]

I took our Roadster in for service yesterday, and this morning I noticed
that it's sending the same vehicle alert repeatedly at an alarming rate,
like once a second.

Vehicle Alert Code: TR1N/29 (00000000)

I tried calling the store to ask them to unplug the OVMS, but they weren't
answering the phone (it was before they were officially open).

I then tried to turn off GPRS to get it to stop spewing. I sent a PARAMS
command to only allow SMS, but that didn't work. Thinking that it might need
to reboot to get the command to stick, I sent a RESET command, which did the
trick. I see there's code to call vehicle_initialise() after handling a
PARAMS command, so I'm a little surprised the RESET was needed.

Then I remembered that version 2.3.2 mentioned a way to turn off vehicle
alerts. From the release notes:

## Add facility to suppress vehicle alerts via carbits feature +16

But Mark's email from April 16th says:

> Yes, car bits feature 14, add 8 to the value (bit #3) to
> suppress vehicle alerts via push notification.

>From looking at the code, it looks like adding 8 (setting the 8 bit in
binary) to the value for Feature 14 will turn off sending the vehicles
alerts to the server.

I have Feature 14 set to 1 to indicate that ours is a 2008 Roadster, so I
added 1+8=9 and sent "FEATURE 14 9", then re-enabled SMS,IP, and RESET. That
restored network comms so the OVMS app is working again, and I'm not seeing
the alerts any more.

Finally, I notice there's code to prevent OVMS from sending the same alert
more than once per minute, but if another code comes in, or the alert gets
cancelled, the 60-second timer gets cleared.

I wonder if that code should be more aggressive about limiting alert
frequency. I suspect what's happening with the Roadster is that it's
repeatedly firing and then dismissing an alert message (presumably related
to the service they are doing), which completely circumvents the timer,
resulting in a ridiculous number of alert messages.

I suspect this was happening all night, so my next phone bill may be
interesting at $2/MB.

    Tom