MMM-UkNationalRail - stops updating on mirror

randomnoise

@nwootton thought I’d check to see if you have any ideas what could be causing an issue I’ve been having with the UK train times… When its been running for a while I often notice that it seems to have stopped updating itself so will be frozen showing train time in the past. This happens every couple of days, no specific time it can happen mid day or at night (when there are no trains scheduled so nothing to see ‘No departure info found’). It has kind of always done this, although it used to go the best part of a week before requiring a restart.

When it occurs I can confirm that all the other modules on my mirror are still happily updating. Also if I fire up the mirror webpage on my laptop it has the correct up to date info.

No errors logged in PM2 error & as far as teh pm2 out log looks everything still working ok.

I restart mm & it fires up as normal. Any thoughts? Any further steps I should take to troubleshoot?

I’m fairly certain its gotten worse since updating to MM 2.1.3, seems like I’m rebooting every other day now.

nwootton

@randomnoise Apologies, I’ve only just seen this message. I’ll try to look tomorrow and see if I can replicate the issue, but I suspect it is due to the data coming in from the Transport API. I’ve already got bugs from months ago still not addressed by them to do with bus times failing to be properly updated.

randomnoise

No worries, let me know if I can do anything to give you any further info to assist with troubleshooting. Cheers.

nwootton

@randomnoise Can you send me your config for the module? Don’t need the API keys, but the rest of it would allow me to see if it’s something specific to the data provider.

Thanks

randomnoise

@nwootton Mainly going with defaults, but here is what I’m using.

{
		module: 'MMM-UKNationalRail',
		position: 'top_left',
		config: {
			stationCode: 		'[My 3 letter station code]', 		// CRS code for station
			app_id: 			'[My ID]', 	// TransportAPI App ID
			app_key: 			'[My api key]', // TransportAPI App Key
			maxResults: 		4,  //Optional - Maximum results to display.
			showOrigin: 		false   //Optional - Show the origin of the train in the table
			}
		},

nwootton

@randomnoise Can you tell me the station code? I can’t try to replicate or even figure out if it’s the provider without it.

nwootton

OK, I’ve had my test environment running for a couple of days running both my station and your config with the provided station ID.

0_1508755348541_Screen Shot 2017-10-23 at 11.41.59.png

So far I’ve not seen the module fail to update, although the mirror itself has frozen on 1 occasion. I’ll keep trying it, but it’s quite difficult to debug without actually figuring out how to replicate it.

randomnoise

@nwootton Hmm, that’s weird. I guess it could be an issue specific to my mirror. What os do you use? Have you also upgraded to 2.1.3 of mm as well?

I might try a rebuild & see if that improves it.

Is there any way to add in debug logging to text file? Perhaps when it updates the data from transport api & refreshes the screen.

What I found strange was that even while it’s stopped updating on my actual mirror, it will work fine in a browser on another machine on my network (does this actually run another version of node helper etc or is the mirror still fetching the data?)

nwootton

I used to run the mirror 2.1.2 on a RPi3, but that PI got repurposed for another project and is unlikely to make it back. For dev work I run it in either server or dev mode on a Mac. I’m running v2.1.3 on Node v8.7.0/npm v5.5.1 on the dev machine.

As it the mirror is a client-server architecture, it makes sense that the server part would be still receiving info from the Transport API. This seems to point to either Electron (UI) or Sockets.io failure rather than data ingest.

What version of Node & npm is running on your mirror? Are you running it as an all-in-one or are you running it in a different way (server only, docker)?

There is a simple “debug” : true setting you can add to the module config, but that mostly just gives the params & url that would be used by the module to contact the TransportAPI. The only other way is to launch the mirror using:

npm start dev

which will start Electron and also display a debug console on the right hand side of the screen.

randomnoise

@nwootton not sure what version of node I’m running atm (I’m away for work)… I’ll try the npm start dev when I’m back & see if anything stands out.

I run the mirror standalone so, yes I guess it could be an issue with something in the pi browser, but it is a fairly standard mm build installed following the instructions from mm git page.

I’ll report back once I’ve tried the dev start.