Third-Party Module - how to get help?

ember1205

“do a get pull”… To date, I’ve done little with repositories - can you elaborate on how I do this to make sure I do it correctly?

Also… Some updates.

CTRL - does not affect image size in any way. It DOES affect the sizing of the text for the other modules, though.
I believe that I have determined that the desktop / browser “believes” that it is in portrait mode. The images seem to be getting constrained properly, but because the browser is configured to be as tall as it is, I’m losing all kinds of content off the bottom of the screen. If I do a CTRL-SHIFT-I and then turn on the device toolbar, I see a full vertical representation of the browser and I can see the entire image. As I increase the zoom, it becomes apparent where the image is getting clipped vertically.

Thoughts?

sdetweil

@ember1205
do a get pull…

No
“do a git pull”

Do

cd ~/MagicMirror/modules/MMM-ImagesPhotos
git pull

That copies the latest from a remote repo and updates the local copy and working directory.

I don’t understand how electron thinks it should be in portrait mode. Never seen that

sdetweil

@sdetweil yeh, you should NOT zoom in

I wonder if this has anything to do with the fake kms driver?

ember1205

@sdetweil

git pull says everything up to date and didn’t do anything. No image size info available.

I tried reverting TO the fake driver as I was not using it (real one instead) and that hasn’t made any difference. I also tried editing the startup file to remove the rotate setting, also didn’t help.

sdetweil

@ember1205 did u install.my MMM-ImagesPhotos or the original?

I JUST updated mine before telling u, and I just checked the new code is there.

In the MMM-ImagePhotos folder do
git remote -v
Should point to sdetweil

ember1205

@sdetweil

I followed the directions on the page for your module:

Clone this repository inside your MagicMirror's modules folder

cd ~/MagicMirror/modules

git clone https://github.com/roramirez/MMM-ImagesPhotos.git.

I saw the reference to roramirez, but as I said - I don’t do a lot with git, so I have to go with what’s on the page. Did that install the original?

sdetweil

@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

ember1205

@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!

sdetweil

@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!

ember1205

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?