Motion Detector

mongo116

I’ve got the motion detection now working - had to add bcm2835-v4l2 to \etc\modules - restarted and screen now turns off after defined period and on when motion is detected. This is really great, and I’m nearly there - but… Now when the motiondetector is running, the RPi3 temp just goes up and up and up, until it eventually crashes/freezes and I have to pull the power as RPi is completely unresponsive. If I remove motiondetector from MagicMirror, temperature stays stable and no crashing. Is there something I can change in the config to sort out this performance issue?

strawberry 3.141

@mongo116 it looks like https://github.com/alexyak/motiondetector/blob/master/diff-cam-engine.js#L37 it creates 10 images per second and compares it to the previous which is probably the intensive part

mongo116

@strawberry-3.141 Thanks for that. I’ve amended this slightly so will keep an eye on it. Might also have a look at putting on some heatsinks to see if that helps.

One (hopefully!) final question. When the monitor is turned off, is there a way to ‘freeze’ the other modules, so they stop running for the duration that the monitor is off? This would hopefully help with performance, in that the other modules are no longer running.

strawberry 3.141

@mongo116 every module has a suspend and resume function, but nearly none module that I’m aware of has implemented stopping intervals and fetching data in there. so calling those functions wouldn’t make a difference then just hiding it on the display.

Furthermore I doubt that it would really make a difference if you’re not using another cpu intensive task like voice recognition …

reaper81

sorry for my noob-Question but is there an setup or a explaination how to use the three .js files from alexeyak on github? normaly there is an readme-file.

mongo116

@reaper81 I had the following in my config.js:

              {
                module: 'motiondetector',
                config: {
                timeout: 5*60*1000
                   }
               },

You will need to ensure that the 3 files are located in the modules/motiondetector folder.

I ended up using a different method for motion detection though, as tvservice kept stopping working.

jdahli1

So after far too many months, I’ve finally gotten my mirror put together. Everything is working great, except for this module (sometimes). After a reboot everything works at least once, meaning that the monitor will turn off when no motion is detected and turn on once motion is detected. Sometimes, it will work correctly for an entire day. Others, it will work once and then the monitor will not turn back on until I reboot the pi. After the monitor refuses to wake up, I receive the following in the pm2 logs when it does detect motion.

0|mm       | monitor :state 0x7ee68dbc [HDMI unknown AR x38128 HDCP], 2129038664x4287062190 @ 45744.00Hz, interlaced
0|mm       | monitor :state 0x7ee8bdbc [HDMI unknown AR x13552 HDCP], 2129182024x4287062190 @ 21168.00Hz, interlaced
0|mm       | monitor has been deactivated
0|mm       | monitor :state 0x7ebe5dbc [HDMI unknown AR x25840 HDCP], 2126404936x4287062190 @ 33456.00Hz, interlaced
0|mm       | monitor :state 0x7e9afdbc [HDMI unknown AR x13552 HDCP], 2124086600x4287062190 @ 21168.00Hz, interlaced
0|mm       | monitor has been deactivated
0|mm       | monitor :state 0x7e8dadbc [HDMI unknown AR x21744 HDCP], 2123214152x4287062190 @ 29360.00Hz, interlaced
0|mm       | monitor :state 0x7efdcdbc [HDMI unknown AR x54512 HDCP], 2130562376x4287062190 @ 62128.00Hz, interlaced```

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to prevent this from happening? Is there a better place to look at logs other than pm2 to see exactly what is happening. It is very odd to me that it works for different amounts of time after each reboot.

For what it’s worth, when the screen stops waking up, I can navigate to rasperrybi.local:8080 in a browser and all of the modules are up and running.

Any thoughts or comments are appreciated.

Hawking

@jdahli1
I don’t know this error, therefore the following two comments might be totally wrong:

The motion detector uses

/opt/vc/bin/tvservice --preferred && sudo chvt 6 && sudo chvt 7

to switch the monitor on. What happens if you execute this command manually while the observed problem occurs (I assume you can still login to the PI?). Then you might know weather it is a problem of the motion detection (and MMM) or if it is a more general problem. Maybe you even get additional error messages that help you to identify the problem

Do you know the HDMI-settings in /boot/config.txt ?
Maybe it is worth to play around with hdmi_force_hotplug, hdmi_drive, hdmi_group and hdmi_mode . See the file and here https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/tags/config.txt/info for more information. Maybe the “AR” in your error stands for “aspect ratio”, this could be set explicitly be these parameters.

If somebody got this module to work on a Raspberry Pi Zero (using the Midori browser) I would be highly interested in how it was done!

jdahli1

@Hawking Thank you for the reply. Running that command does not appear to do anything. I let it sit for a minute and the command never completes, nor does the screen come on. It will sit until I ctrl + c. I will start to mess with the hdmi settings and see if that makes any difference.

Hawking

@jdahli1
Can you just execute /opt/vc/bin/tvservice --preferred to see if it is tvservice or chvt that does not respond?

Here https://news.screenly.io/how-to-automatically-turn-off-and-on-your-monitor-from-your-raspberry-pi-5f259f40cae5 also problems with turning the screen back on using tvservice are mentioned. Maybe the other methods mentioned in the article are worth a try. If they work you can simply change the commands used in ~/MagicMirror/modules/motiondetector/node_helper.js