Cool. I download the latest one and try it out.

Glad I can help you keep improving your code! lol

Most monitors are IPS panels while most TV’s are VA panels. IPS has wider viewing angles with consistent color. The VA panels have better refresh rates for motion (which is not commonly needed for something like a mirror).

TV’s can be an easy choice because they can be much more available and a remote could be useful. A monitor will generally make for a preferred screen by having better viewing angles and being lighter overall.

@raf Are you volunteering? :)

Seriously - You won’t be anywhere near as well-versed as if you can figure it out on your own. And documenting your learnings to help others is how all of this stuff grows and improves. I’ve pestered @sdetweil plenty about a lot - much of his input has been to help me understand where to look, but he has also done some coding and such on his side. I’ve offered back some things I learned along the way that he has then incorporated and I’m now going to look into helping to extend and enhance some work he has done by doing the coding myself. It take a village, as they say…

@sdetweil I don’t believe it’s the modules.

Leap 16 fresh install is fine with a fresh MM install as well. I upgraded the server again from Leap 15 to Leap16. Before the upgrade, I removed node and npm modules linked to version 18 and MM was running fine in all mannners.

After the upgrade, I made a couple of system-level changes (like disabling the firewall that it forces on you) and added the node/npm modules for version 24 and wasn’t able to start the mirror with pm2 like normal… it continues to throw errors about node18 being missing. However, running the mm.sh script manually or launching the mirror via either npm start server or node --run server works fine.

Did more digging around and found that the issue lies solely in the hands of pm2… the back-end environment was created back in the node/npm 18 days and that was saved in the configuration. The only way to find it was to do a “pm2 dump” and scan the file.

Once I knew it was pm2 for sure, the actual fix was pretty simple:

pm2 save
npm install pm2 -g
pm2 update
pm2 unstartup
pm2 startup

If MM wasn’t still configured as a process…

cd ~
pm2 start mm.sh
pm2 save

I’m running on Leap 16, latest patches, node/npm 18 is uninstalled, mirror is properly auto-launching. Now, I can update the modules and the mirror… But not before I do a snapshot! lol

@raf So, figure out what’s incorrect and help get it updated. The doc you’re trying to work from was built in that same way at one point…

Update… 30 full days since my last post about stability and have not experienced a single crash on either mirror. So, Electron is definitely the source of the problem.

Thank you to @sdetweil for the assistance in swapping over to Chromium and getting things to a stable state.

UPDATE: At this point, I’m closing in on a full week of operating two mirrors without issue. I’ve changed to running Chromium instead of Electron and it’s working well all around. Here are some details of the operation in case it’s useful:

• Pi 3 Model B (one UK, one China)
• MM 2.12.0
• Native modules configured: WeatherForecast, CurrentWeather (both weather modules set to different locations as the two Pi’s are in different locations), clock, calendar (2 instances, 2 different Google calendars), alert, updatenotification
• Third-party modules: MMM-ImagesPhotos (@sdetweil version)
• Customizations:
• • Modified the WeatherForecast module according to this thread to get 5 days of forecast data back after recent MM update: https://forum.magicmirror.builders/topic/13187/weatherforecast-showing-only-two-days/31?_=1601303807634
• • Converted to using Chromium instead of Electron locally as detailed in this thread
• • Chromium update / notice disabled via the step from a couple of posts prior to this one
• • Allow connections from local LAN addresses
• Pi connected to a smart plug that turns on each day at 7AM, cron job to execute “init 0” each day at 11PM, smart plug turns off at 11:05PM

Prior to successfully switching over to Chromium, the devices would crash at least once every other day (at least one of them would crash during a 48 hour window), although it was much more common to see each one crash multiple times per day. There was no consistency to which one would crash, why, when, etc. The “crash” in question was a black screen on the mirror and no visible info being output although the mouse cursor would sometimes appear. I wrote a cron job that would run every five minutes, look up the location of the pm2 error logs, check to see if there was an “out of memory” error in the log, and do a restart of MM if there was (the restart consisted of shut down, log flush, and start). This job ran every five minutes and would silently exit if there was no error as the mirror was running ok.

Since the switchover, I have seen zero crashes on either device in almost seven days of operation.

Electron has been discussed ad nauseum as having a variety of shortcomings, bugs, issues, etc. - especially in the old version being used with MM. At this point, I have to wonder why it’s still not only the default but the ‘only’ browser that’s really discussed for use with MM. It would seem that it’s time to either forklift an upgrade to it within MM or switch to something else (at a minimum, at least provide a well-documented alternative).

I’m grateful to @sdetweil for his assistance with this, especially since it really took a calendar year almost to get to a point where it’s seemingly working as expected now.

@sdetweil

Now I have to find something else to break… sigh… :)

@sdetweil Yeah… I should have said I updated to the latest version of Bullseye with all patches. I haven’t made the last step to Bookworm yet…