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    Third-Party Module - how to get help?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Solved Troubleshooting
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    • S Do not disturb
      sdetweil @ember1205
      last edited by

      @ember1205 yes, u installed the original… when one develops enhancements of a git project, you make a connected copy (fork), anything u change can be sent back to the author with a ‘pull request’. I didn’t change any of his install instructions.

      when u are on a git project, there is a button, clone or download(the fork, not the original), u press that, and then click the little clipboard icon to copy the url for the git clone command

      at any time, you can see where your instance is sourced from by doing

      git remote -v
      

      in the module folder

      so, I would rename the current folder out of the way (the original doesn’t work at all for me)

      cd ~/MagicMirror/modules
      mv MMM-ImagesPhotos MMM-ImagesPhotos.orig
      git clone https://github.com/sdetweil/MMM-ImagesPhotos
      

      and then restart the mirror

      Sam

      How to add modules

      learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

      E 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • E Offline
        ember1205 @sdetweil
        last edited by

        @sdetweil

        Sigh. Best laid plans… lol

        At any rate - I actually rm’ed the original dir and re-did the clone using YOUR version. Came right up and started working properly right out of the gate.

        Thanks for not only all of the help, but all of the patience. I do learn quickly, and this should now remain fairly firmly entrenched in my brain going forward.

        Now I’m off to see how to modify the CSS of MM to change some of the font aspects for text!

        S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • S Do not disturb
          sdetweil @ember1205
          last edited by

          @ember1205 cool. thanks for the feedback… come on back when u need help, there are amazing talented folks who can help with just about everything!

          Sam

          How to add modules

          learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

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          • E Offline
            ember1205
            last edited by

            I know this is marked ‘solved’, but I wanted to mention that A ) the module does still crash with “out of memory” errors and B ) a little bit of investigative tinkering makes me think that this all ties back to a garbage collection issue with Java.

            If I change the timing of how often the images change, I can effectively ‘force’ or almost eliminate a crash. The shorter the duration between photos, the more likely a crash will occur. I changed the timing to 45 seconds and saw the setup run reliably from power on at 7AM until power off at 11PM for multiple days in a row.

            Shortening the window down to 5 seconds between images will cause the system to crash typically within about 10-15 minutes at a maximum.

            At no time do I actively witness memory levels dropping down to zero, but that could just be “bad luck” in not seeing the issue arise when it errors out. Is there an easy way on the Pi to track a process and watch for a specific, correlating event when something crashes?

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            • E Offline
              ember1205
              last edited by

              Also - I caught this error with your debug output:

              Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404 (Not Found) :8080/MMM-ImagesPhotos/photos:1 
              

              That’s at the beginning of the console output along with another error I have seen later in the console:

              MMM-ImagesPhotos Could not load photos
              photosrequest.onreadystatechange @ :8080/modules/MMM-ImagesPhotos/MMM-ImagesPhotos.js:65
              

              Any thoughts on those?

              S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • S Do not disturb
                sdetweil @ember1205
                last edited by

                @ember1205 i am not aware of any debugging tools or strategy that can get to the type of issue being encountered. I have been chasing these for the last 4 years…

                i also think the error reported is bogus, caused by the mishandling of some other error.

                the ‘problem’ is that the browser thinks IT is in control of the content update cycle, but with all these modules running separate timer event handlers, it is not.

                I have debugged a lot of ‘electron is single threaded’ problems down to , ‘you might THINK its single threaded, but it is NOT’… when the timer fires, SOMETHING is getting interrupted… in gosh knows what state…

                one way you might prove this, is to turn off every other module, so only ONE does any content updating (it is a web page after all)

                One of my modules has 2-10 images loaded over the top of the web page, on independent timing cycles. i traced failures to attempting to load an image, while an image load was already in progress. I added code to my module to prevent this behavior, and my failures went away.

                I added a background image thing, and they returned when my module is running…
                they are both loading images at the same time sometimes… and electron crashes… in various ways.

                I have been trying (last 6 months) to find a mechanism to serialize this across multiple modules, without changing the modules, but have failed so far.

                we are also running on an age old electron (3.x), which the most recent version that will run for MM is 6.x) (7.x will not run)

                Sam

                How to add modules

                learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

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                • S Do not disturb
                  sdetweil @ember1205
                  last edited by

                  @ember1205 said in Third-Party Module - how to get help?:

                  :8080/MMM-ImagesPhotos/photos:1

                  yeh, the code attempts to load the folder… once… I haven’t debugged it cause it doesn’t matter

                  Sam

                  How to add modules

                  learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

                  E 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • E Offline
                    ember1205 @sdetweil
                    last edited by

                    @sdetweil said in Third-Party Module - how to get help?:

                    @ember1205 said in Third-Party Module - how to get help?:

                    :8080/MMM-ImagesPhotos/photos:1

                    yeh, the code attempts to load the folder… once… I haven’t debugged it cause it doesn’t matter

                    Thanks.

                    What about second error I mentioned? Or, is that essentially part of the overall error?

                    S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • S Do not disturb
                      sdetweil @ember1205
                      last edited by

                      @ember1205 part of the same… looking at it now

                      Sam

                      How to add modules

                      learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

                      S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • S Do not disturb
                        sdetweil @sdetweil
                        last edited by

                        @ember1205

                        ok, fixed the error message… a startup timing error…

                        module tried to get images from node_helper, before node_helper had established the linkage…
                        (if u are using my repo)
                        go to your MMM-ImagesPhotos folder and do

                        git pull

                        then restart mirror app

                        Sam

                        How to add modules

                        learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

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                        • E Offline
                          ember1205
                          last edited by

                          I don’t seem to be seeing that error any more, but now it’s crying about not using HTTPS (warning, not error, and specifically for Electron). For whatever reason, that warning wasn’t showing up in the console prior although I’m sure that it was there in some capacity.

                          I -do- see an indication of an error but can’t seem to find any error in the console.

                          S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • S Do not disturb
                            sdetweil @ember1205
                            last edited by

                            @ember1205 that big pile of warning is just that warning… a couple years ago, the networking community decide that EVEY website should move away from http, to https, to reduce hacking the clear text content as it went by…

                            so, electron is warning that u didn’t use https

                            Sam

                            How to add modules

                            learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

                            E 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • E Offline
                              ember1205 @sdetweil
                              last edited by

                              @sdetweil said in Third-Party Module - how to get help?:

                              @ember1205 that big pile of warning is just that warning… a couple years ago, the networking community decide that EVEY website should move away from http, to https, to reduce hacking the clear text content as it went by…

                              so, electron is warning that u didn’t use https

                              Oh, I’m well aware. This sort of stuff is “what I do” every day. I just find it interesting that I didn’t see it before, see it now, and can’t seem to find the error that is being indicated is present.

                              Switching to an external browser allows me to find the error - it’s actually related to one of the weather modules. The specific complaint is that I don’t have permission to load the weather map.

                              Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 401 (Unauthorized)
                              https://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast/daily?id=< removed>&units=imperial&lang=en&APPID=< removed>
                              

                              I’ll have to look and see if I can turn off the attempt to load that map.

                              S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • S Do not disturb
                                sdetweil @ember1205
                                last edited by

                                @ember1205 said in Third-Party Module - how to get help?:

                                Oh, I’m well aware. This sort of stuff is “what I do” every day.

                                cool…

                                i can’t explain why it wasn’t shown before… I see it all the time (assuming I don’t have some filter enabled to select just messages for specific modules…)…
                                oh I did a dummy routine to replace the MM provided one that echos notifications received,
                                cause the darned clock module sends an annoying notice every second.

                                Sam

                                How to add modules

                                learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

                                lavolp3L 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • lavolp3L Offline
                                  lavolp3 Module Developer @sdetweil
                                  last edited by

                                  @sdetweil said in Third-Party Module - how to get help?:

                                  cause the darned clock module sends an annoying notice every second.

                                  hasn’t this been resolved with a recent update? If not it should be.
                                  With the update to 2.10.0 I don’t get any notifications by the clock anymore.

                                  How to troubleshoot modules
                                  MMM-soccer v2, MMM-AVStock

                                  S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • S Do not disturb
                                    sdetweil @lavolp3
                                    last edited by

                                    @lavolp3 not different

                                    if (self.config.displaySeconds) if u have seconds displayed on your time, u still get notices

                                    this is the default setting (was on 2.9, is on 2.10)

                                    Sam

                                    How to add modules

                                    learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

                                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • S Do not disturb
                                      sdetweil
                                      last edited by

                                      @ember1205 you need to do another git pull…

                                      i found a case where it doesn’t update the image anymore…

                                      Sam

                                      How to add modules

                                      learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

                                      E 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • E Offline
                                        ember1205 @sdetweil
                                        last edited by

                                        @sdetweil said in Third-Party Module - how to get help?:

                                        @ember1205 you need to do another git pull…

                                        i found a case where it doesn’t update the image anymore…

                                        Will do.

                                        As an aside… I directly witnessed an odd scenario the other day when I had it refreshing every five minutes… one of the images only loaded the upper half on the screen (the bottom half of the screen had no image and was blank). I could not tell what image it was as I have quite a few in rotation and the frame continued on cleanly from there with the next image.

                                        Is that in any way related to what you found?

                                        S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • S Do not disturb
                                          sdetweil @ember1205
                                          last edited by

                                          @ember1205 no… I have seen the slow paint issue myself many times…

                                          electron is having some painting problem… again we are on 3.0.13, no longer supported since way back…

                                          I had tried to get us to 6.0.12 this release, but the test system failed, and they removed this change from the 2.10 release
                                          (but I have seen paint problems on 6.0.12 too)

                                          u can try this manually

                                          cd ~/MagicMirror
                                          npm install electron@6.0.12
                                          

                                          Sam

                                          How to add modules

                                          learning how to use browser developers window for css changes

                                          E 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • E Offline
                                            ember1205 @sdetweil
                                            last edited by

                                            @sdetweil said in Third-Party Module - how to get help?:

                                            @ember1205 no… I have seen the slow paint issue myself many times…

                                            electron is having some painting problem… again we are on 3.0.13, no longer supported since way back…

                                            I had tried to get us to 6.0.12 this release, but the test system failed, and they removed this change from the 2.10 release
                                            (but I have seen paint problems on 6.0.12 too)

                                            u can try this manually

                                            cd ~/MagicMirror
                                            npm install electron@6.0.12
                                            

                                            What I saw seemed to be different from a “slow paint” issue - it painted the top half and stopped. It sat there for a few seconds and then the image switched to the next one.

                                            While upgrading manually would certainly get me to something newer for Electron, it puts me in the position of not having a “standard install” for future troubleshooting and such. It’s a double-edged sword…

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