@sdetweil I did find dietPi (https://dietpi.com/) to be the best distro for ease of installation, generally small, and still up to date - they keep up to date with Debian

My experience trying to run MM on a system with 512MB of RAM is really poor. I found it pretty frustrating really.

Very nice. I have done something similar, although I prefer the Pi 3 Model A+. It’s slightly bigger than the zero 2w but is clocked faster (1.4 GHz vs 1) and has a full-size HDMI port. (they both use essentially the same SoC).

Note I have historically had problems with running out of memory running electron in the 512 MB limited memory space - but using dietPI has really help stability

I had considerable problems with running on a model A - but I found dietPI (https://dietpi.com/) to be a solid distro that works well even when using the default electron GUI front-end. (Previously OOM’d consistently)

Note, also I frequently have trouble with the calendar events appears as there seems to be some problem in the websocket communication layer (this bug: https://github.com/MagicMirrorOrg/MagicMirror/issues/3380)

I basically use MMM-RemoteControl to force a refresh in a daily cron job (curl http://localhost:8080/api/refresh) and this works. Why? No One knows

uname -m
armv7l

cat /etc/os-release 
PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)"

free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           425Mi       316Mi        99Mi       8.1Mi        67Mi       108Mi
Swap:          732Mi       274Mi       457Mi

swapon -s
Filename				Type		Size		Used		Priority
/var/swap                               file		204796		0		-2
/dev/zram0                              partition	544892		299760		15

zramctl 
NAME       ALGORITHM DISKSIZE   DATA COMPR  TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 lz4         532.1M 292.7M 98.2M 101.8M       4 [SWAP]


Jan 26 22:00:46 kid-mirror kernel: Out of memory: Killed process 23127 (WebKitWebProces) total-vm:1178000kB, anon-rss:184084kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:0kB, UID:1000 pgtables:1044kB oom_score_adj:0

Although it’s not related to your problem - I have a lot of trouble getting MM to run on the 512MB Pi3 A+.

It freezes often - possibly it’s bad h/w or sd card although it all tests fine - but after several days of running and it ends up frozen and inaccessible. (ie can’t ssh to it, etc unless I restart it)

I tried using some of the lower memory options instead of using electron without much success. It runs for a little longer but eventually still dies. None of my Pi3 B models with the 4GB RAM have had similar problems - so I tend to think it is something related to RAM

Just to say that you may find the experience in running on the Pi 3 A+ to be “complicated”

Then use Ext3Agenda in the normal way vertical way.

In any event, it sounds like you don’t want the month view - and Ext3 does have just a week view - so maybe it’s as simple as just using week view for you.

Ext3Agenda supports calendars in the same way AFAIK as Ext3 - so I would expect if Ext3 works then Ext3Agenda also works

I would try using Ext3Agenda version in horizontal layout - it is by the same author and it sounds like the Horizontal layout might be what you want

https://github.com/MMRIZE/MMM-CalendarExt3Agenda

https://github.com/MMRIZE/MMM-CalendarExt3Agenda/wiki/Horizontal-layout

Something even stranger - if I immediately refresh the page it also works. Here I mean is:

npm run server
got to browser and bring up host:8080
calendar will say “Loading” for a very long time
(despite the events getting broadcast)

But if I :
npm run server
go to browser and bring up host:8080
calender says “Loading”
Refresh the page immediately
calendar says “Loading”
calendar will immediately show the events as soon as the events are broadcast

I added various log outputs to node_helper.js and calendar.js

node_helper is sending the socket notification for CALENDAR_EVENTS
this is not received by the front end code in calendar.js

I don’t know what happens to it, but I added logging to print out in calendar.js whenever the socketNotificationReceived handler is called and it doesn’t print.

(unless I refresh the page - at which point it does)

@sdetweil You mean fetchInterval: 5 * 60 * 1000?

the calendar module doesn’t have refreshinterval does it?

@sdetweil No errors in the console log

If I wait long enough where this seems anywhere between 15min to an hour or more, they do appear without a manual refresh.

maybe it’s a complexity issue - when I curl the calender link (it’s a google private ICS link) - the resulting file is 4.8MB - I imagine parsing that is somewhat time-consuming

@sdetweil No, I’m stopped testing Ext3 and I am only testing the default calendar.

it is not working - I see Loading... for some number of minutes or hours, I haven’t determined any consistency. This test run is now past 45 mins and it still says Loading… despite having broadcast the events 9 times:

[2025-01-27 14:25:24.525] [LOG]   Starting MagicMirror: v2.31.0-develop 
...
[2025-01-27 14:25:31.806] [LOG]   Create new calendarfetcher for URL ...
[2025-01-27 14:26:21.083] [INFO]  Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 22 events from ...
[2025-01-27 14:32:08.812] [INFO]  Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 22 events from ...
[2025-01-27 14:37:55.863] [INFO]  Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 22 events from
[2025-01-27 14:43:42.948] [INFO]  Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 22 events from
[2025-01-27 14:49:30.144] [INFO]  Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 22 events from 
...
[2025-01-27 15:12:37.552] [INFO]  Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 21 events from 

still says Loading ... - if I refresh the browser page - then they all appear immediately

I did yes - so the current test results are this

The calendar did eventually appear - but it took quite some time - I wasn’t watching, so I don’t know when exactly - I’ll test again. But it was several minutes after the log output of “broadcasting 22 events”

I guess I should have run some tests with just the standard calendar module.

Now just using the standard calendar module - and it just says “Loading” despite having also printed “Broadcasting 22 events from”

Actually have to take this back. Currently testing running in server only mode and a browser so I can see the console easier

When I see in the log this line:

[2025-01-27 13:52:24.893] [INFO] Calendar-Fetcher: Broadcasting 22 events from <redacted>

I can say that modules are NOT getting any calendar notifications, despite this log entry. They are not broadcast. I added some code to Ext3Agenda to print out when it gets any notification, and it never gets any CAL items. (I see it getting DOM_CREATED, DOM_UPDATED, etc,etc)

I see in the console log the following:

sorting events count=0
slicing events total maxcount=100

which seems odd given that the helper reported broadcasting 22 events. Those items repeat in the console log , but it’s always sorting events count=0

UNTIL I refresh the browser - Now I see the Ext3Agenda module getting CALENDER_EVENTS and sorting events count=22

Bah! I have to apologize - I was on the develop branch but apparently, I was some commits behind and I think I was missing the commit that fixed the “clipping” problem

I made sure to update to the head of develop and things are working much better now. So it seems all along it has been the known issue

Doh!

Yea, I believe the default calender is working and broadcasting correctly - not sure exactly where Ext3Agenda is having problems - but I have a few ideas I plan to try out.

Further strangeness.

Let’s say I change waitFetch to something that shouldn’t work (eg 5 seconds) - clearly, this doesn’t work since the first broadcast is after a minute or so.

But if I manually refresh the browser as soon as I see the log entry about the broadcast - everything appears just fine.

So for example, setting

waitFetch: 5 * 1000,
refreshInterval: 2 * 60 * 1000,

Nothing will appear in the calendar - not at start (expected) and not after 2 mins (1 refresh), or 4 mins, or 10 mins or however long I want to wait - nothing.

But if I manually refresh - everything appears right away as long as I refresh after the broadcast log line

I am on the develop branch

The entire start is at 10:54:23

[2025-01-27 10:54:23.207] [LOG] Starting MagicMirror: v2.31.0-develop

I’m not sure when Ext3Agenda starts as there is no log item specific to that afaik - but I assume it’s sometime around:

[2025-01-27 10:54:26.290] [LOG] No helper found for module: MMM-CalendarExt3Agenda.

so Ext3 start is no earlier than 10:54:23 and the first broadcast was at 10:55:44 - this is much less than the 5 minutes I have manually configured for waitFetch.

(in other words, I am waiting much longer than should be needed, but it does not work unless I manually refresh)

The log at 11:01 is the second broadcast of the same calendar

I am only pulling 5 days of data and not broadcasting past events, 23 is correct.

module: "calendar",
hiddenOnStartup: true,
position: "top_left",
config: {
    broadcastEvents: true,
    broadcastPastEvents: false,
    maximumNumberOfDays: 5,
    maximumEntries: 100,
    fetchInterval: 5 * 60 * 1000,
    calendars: [
    {
        name: "family",
        URL: "<redacted>"
    }
    ]
}

module: "MMM-CalendarExt3Agenda",
position: "top_left",
config: {
    showMiniMonthCalendar: false,
    firstDayOfWeek: 1,
    startDayIndex: 0,
    endDayIndex: 0,
    calendarSet: ['family'],
    waitFetch: 5 * 60 * 1000,
    refreshInterval: 7 * 60 * 1000,
}