Common mistakes — Aquabase gateway

General CanCan problems (LED codes, box invisible on the bus, firmware update) are in Common mistakes. This chapter is what goes wrong with the Aquabase side specifically.

Nothing at all on device/20/…

The gateway publishes only while it is hearing the watermaker. No unit, no topics — not even zeros. Work down this list in order:

Likely cause	How to tell	Fix
The watermaker is switched off	its own panel is dark	power it up; the gateway needs the unit's controller running, not just the bus wired
CAN 2 is not reaching the box	LED normal, MUXEN side fine	check the CAN 2 wiring, and 120 Ω at each end of the Aquabase bus
The Aquabase bus is not at 62.5 kbit/s	total silence rather than errors	the gateway's second bus is fixed at 62.5 kbit/s by the firmware. It cannot be changed by an overlay, a parameter or a command
Wrong firmware in the box	ProductId is not 010010020	check it, and load the right image

It worked, then everything disappeared

The gateway drops the watermaker after 5 seconds without its state message, and stops publishing both topics until it comes back. A watermaker that flickers in and out of the boat's screens is a unit whose messages are not arriving reliably — suspect the bus, the termination or the connector, not the gateway.

While the unit is considered gone, commands from the boat are discarded silently. Nothing is queued and nothing is retried.

Two watermakers report the same values

The watermaker device of this firmware defaults to instance 0, not to "not addressed". A second gateway installed straight out of its box publishes as watermaker 0 alongside the first, and the boat sees one watermaker whose readings jump between two machines.

Number the second box before connecting it to the MUXEN bus:

muxen-uds -i can0 uid --uid <uid> --instance 1 --preferred-function-code 20

muxen-uds -i can0 scan lists what is on the bus; function 20 must appear once per real watermaker.

A command does nothing

Likely cause	How to tell	Fix
The gateway is not hearing the unit	no life topic in the last few seconds	see the first table — commands are dropped while the unit is absent
The unit refuses	the command reaches it, state does not change	its controller has the last word: it will not start into a fault, an emergency stop or a cleaning cycle. Clear it on the Aquabase panel
Wrong instance	another watermaker moved instead	check the instance in the topic

Only three commands are translated: {"produce":true}, {"rinsing":true}, {"off":true}.

Do not send the flow-rate commands

productionFlowUp and productionFlowDown exist on the MUXEN watermaker device for another manufacturer's unit. This gateway does not implement them, and sending one makes it put an ill-formed message on the Aquabase bus. Keep those buttons off any screen page that drives an Aquabase, and configure production flow on the unit itself.

The same applies to automatic-rinsing programming: it is not carried by this version. Program it on the Aquabase panel.

The alarm on the boat is not the fault on the panel

Known limitation of this version: the fault code the gateway publishes is shifted by one against the code the unit reports, except for the three pump faults. In practice the alarm raised on the boat names the neighbouring fault — a high-pressure fault can even come out as "no fault" — while the fault codes for the LP pump, the HP pump and the booster pump are correct.

The Aquabase panel is the authority when the two disagree. The alarm is still a reliable signal that something stopped the machine; do not trust its label to choose a spare part. The full correspondence is in Reference — Aquabase gateway.

The litre counter and the flow percentage stay at zero

They are part of the MUXEN watermaker device but this gateway does not fill them: an Aquabase does not report them. Read the production flow and the hour meter instead. Do not put the litre counter on a screen page for this machine.

WatermakerModel goes back to 2 every time I change it

That is deliberate. The gateway declares itself an Aquabase at every start so the boat knows which machine family it is talking to, and it overwrites anything written into that parameter. Leave it alone.

The box's own relays and inputs never appear

Symptom	Cause	Fix
nothing on device/17/…	the I/O device ships not addressed (InstanceNum = 255)	give it an instance number, and set EnGenIo to 1
the analog inputs read 0 mV	the sensor supply is off (EnAnalogPwr = 0)	set it to 1 and check the sensor

I changed a setting and nothing happened

Instance numbers and bus identities are read once, at startup. Always write with --reboot:

muxen-uds -i can0 -F 20 -I <instance> writeconfig --name InstanceNum --value 1 --reboot

After a factory reset

The watermaker device goes back to instance 0 and the I/O device to 255. Nothing else in this gateway is boat-specific, so re-numbering the two devices is the whole of the recovery — but do it before the box goes back on a bus that already has a watermaker 0.