BME280 found but not reading any values

ESPHome
1

Hi,

I’ve wired two I2C devices to an esp32, a BH1750 which is working and a BM280 which is found on startup, but never reports any values :

i2c:
  sda: 21
  scl: 22
  scan: true
  id: bus_a

sensor:
  - platform: bme280
    temperature:
      name: "Hallway down Temperature"
      oversampling: 16x
    pressure:
      name: "Hallway down Pressure"
    humidity:
      name: "Hallway down Humidity"
    address: 0x76
    update_interval: 60s
  - platform: bh1750
    name: "Hallway down Illuminance"
    address: 0x23
    update_interval: 60s

And the logs :

[18:42:08][C][i2c.arduino:044]:   Recovery: bus successfully recovered
[18:42:08][I][i2c.arduino:054]: Results from i2c bus scan:
[18:42:08][I][i2c.arduino:060]: Found i2c device at address 0x23
[18:42:08][I][i2c.arduino:060]: Found i2c device at address 0x76

It then reads a value from the luminance sensor every minute just fine :

[18:42:27][D][bh1750.sensor:159]: 'Hallway down Illuminance': Got illuminance=76.1lx
[18:42:27][D][sensor:125]: 'Hallway down Illuminance': Sending state 76.06299 lx with 1 decimals of accuracy

But never anything from the BME280. Connected to home assistant confirms the same, the luminance has a value but the other three sensors are unknown.
Am I missing something ? Did I damage it during soldering, could it be found if the I2C wasn’t wired properly ?
I’m feeding it 3.3v directly from the esp32, which presumably is enough since it’s labelled ‘2-6V’.

Thanks

2

That looks fine. Maybe a cabling issue - how far is the sensor from the ESP?

I have killed one of these soldering before so that’s a possibility as well.

3

It’s right next to it, on the same board.
I’ve never used I2C before, would the esp find it even if it was dead ?
I do have another one but it’s going to be a pain to take out and replace

4

There are other components on the board apart from the I2C bus controller, so I suppose it’s possible for it to work but something else be kaput.

5

I also saw a thread where the device was a BMP280 rather a BME - with the cheaper ones it’s sometimes harder to tell.

6

Hey,

Thanks, but the one I have has BME280 written on it pretty big. Good to know though, could pick some of the cheaper ones up next time !

I’ve tried again this morning and it worked. Then after a restart it couldn’t find the device at all anymore, so even though the multimeter was saying the connections were good, I re-soldered all of them.

It’s working now, so I’ll leave it be for a while and we’ll see if it breaks again, I very might have damaged it slighlty during soldering, my iron wasn’t in a great state. Just got a new one with a clean tip, should help for next time as well.

Thanks !

7

I think I had two issues, first I noticed a couple of pins weren’t actually soldered, just touching it. So I re-soldered them too and presumably that helps.
Secondly the BME280 was the furthest, so I had one wire doing a nice loop around the rest of the circuit and another one going to the other sensor, which means they were both longer.

I replaced those wires with shorter, direct ones and it seems to be more reliable so far.
I think everything I did with my old soldering iron was crap, that was the answer !

Thanks again, all good now

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