Driver with the exclamation mark

[Wintespe]

I have programmed a few Shelly plus 1 with Tasmota version 14.4.1. Everything worked as it should, nice. I looked at the status 4 of the device in the console and was quite surprised. Some of the drivers had an exclamation mark in front of them. I'm not sure what this means. Is it that the driver with the exclamation mark is present but not enabled? If so, how do you make it active? I have not found any reference in the documentation. I would be happy to receive a hint, thank you.

[barbudor]

Correct
See : i2cdriver command and I2CDevices

[Wintespe]

Thanks for the quick reply. For I2c the syntax is clear like: I2cDriver10 0
I have not found any input for a driver.
For Drivers, Drivers ... I get an error message like
Drivers {"Command": "Unknown", "Input": "DRIVERS"}

Is there any way to enter a command in the console to enable/disable a specific driver? What is the syntax for this.

[arendst]

No there is no command to disable or enable a driver. The exclamation mark is shown for inactive drivers. These are drivers that have not been configured by GPIO or OPTION.

[sfromis]

You are way out in the weeds of premature optimization when worrying about a few instructions, which just does not "count" as "using resources" in the larger balance. If you could measure a real difference in energy consumption, you'd be starting to get there, but that would not be for one driver doing no work even if enabled.

The point of "activated or not" is two-fold. First, can be useful to see if you have gotten to the point of the driver even becoming active; if not you could have something to fix. And in some cases (like with I2CDriver and SetSensor), you may want to avoid a driver doing the work it is meant to do, like if you are debugging something else.

Still, while one driver does not really count, calling up to over 100 drivers failing to initialize (becoming active) would start to count, and every driver having to service calls when it already has "bailed out" would add to complexity. Those drivers active without having some enabling feature are often simply due to being able to process commands, like Ping. Obviously, this only means processing at the time of executing commands.

[Wintespe]

Thanks for the many hints. I think that the exclamation mark indicates the configuration of the corresponding driver and does not represent an enable/disable state. An unconfigured driver is called but does nothing. If I am wrong, please correct me.

[sfromis]

Well, a driver not flagged as "active" (enabled) does not process all calls.

[s-hadinger]

My point was simply that drivers that are not initialized with GPIO configuration return promptly to the loop handler. Having a mechanism to enable/disable a driver would require the same test in front of the driver, and would incur similar number of cycles, but increased flash size to account for 2 tests (1. is the driver enabled, 2. is it initialied).

Anyways at the end it accounts for a few nanoseconds or microseconds that you wouldn't be even capable of measuring.

[Wintespe]

@s-hadinger
Thanks for the detailed description. This matches what I meant to see in the source code. A bit unusual for me as I have not seen it in this form before. But that doesn't matter.