This appears to be an issue with MMM-Remote-Control, which has a “MONITOROFF” command that I was using to turn off the display. That command executes tvservice -o, which according to this documentation “destroys any framebuffers/dispmanx layers associated with the display” that are not restored when the display comes back on. On their recommendation, I switched the command to vcgencmd display_power 0and my issues have gone away.

I have tried to search for this problem but to no avail.

My mirror uses MMM-PIR-Sensor to turn on the screen when detecting motion, and then off again after 10 seconds. But most times the screen turns on, the UI is “out of sync” with the current time – the clock is wrong, modules haven’t been shown/hidden on schedule with MMM-ModuleScheduler, any Alerts that were triggered won’t show, etc. Sometimes I can see the screen “catch up” if I stay in front of it for a few seconds; sometimes the screen never catches up, and I have to restart the service. I can pull up a browser from another computer or on the Pi, point it at the MM server, and everything is fine on that device – this only seems to be a problem with the default npm start MM process.

Has anyone experienced this issue?

@sdetweil I found that MMM-PIR-Sensor was failing when requiring onoff, so I wiped its node_modules, npm install, and now everything is fine. Sorry for wasting your time!

@sdetweil Thank you for your reply. Raspberry Pi 4. Initially I upgraded with git pull && npm install, but I found your upgrade script and ran that. Now I added -x to run-start, and this is the output:

> magicmirror@2.10.0 start /home/pi/MagicMirror
> ./run-start.sh

+ ./untrack-css.sh
+ '[' -z :0.0 ']'
++ uname -m
+ arch=armv7l
+ false=false
++ grep -v '^\s//' config/config.js
++ grep -i serveronly:
++ awk '{print tolower($2)}'
++ tr -d ',"'\'''
+ serveronly=
+ serveronly=false
++ pgrep Xorg
+ xorg=454
++ uname
+ mac=Linux
+ '[' false. '!=' false. -o armv7l == armv6l ']'
+ '[' 454. == . -a Linux '!=' Darwin ']'
+ electron js/electron.js
[17:16:24.796] [LOG]    Starting MagicMirror: v2.10.0
[17:16:24.810] [LOG]    Loading config ...
[17:16:24.820] [LOG]    Loading module helpers ...
[17:16:24.948] [LOG]    Initializing new module helper ...
[17:16:24.949] [LOG]    Module helper loaded: MMM-Remote-Control

I added some logging to app.js where it loads modules, and the process terminates on the line Module = require(helperPath) when helperPath is the MMM-PIR-Sensor module.

I don’t expect you to diagnose every misbehaving module, so I’ll continue to dig and see what went wrong. Any advice would be appreciated; especially regarding why there’s no issue with node serveronly.

How can I go about diagnosing an issue where node serveronly works fine, but npm start (whether on a terminal or via pm2) fails silently? The only log information from npm is this:

> magicmirror@2.10.0 start /home/pi/MagicMirror
> ./run-start.sh
[15:42:38.586] [LOG]    Starting MagicMirror: v2.10.0
[15:42:38.595] [LOG]    Loading config ...
[15:42:38.600] [LOG]    Loading module helpers ...
[15:42:38.689] [LOG]    Initializing new module helper ...
[15:42:38.690] [LOG]    Module helper loaded: MMM-Remote-Control

(process terminates)

It’s something to do with the MMM-PIR-Sensor module – removing it from config fixes npm start – but the module works fine in node serveronly mode, so I am having trouble identifying the problem.