Topic: pandora alarm not going off

I set up a custom alarm for weekdays at 7:40am for a given pandora station with no backup alarm. It's been two days now and it hasn't gone off on either day. The night I set it, I had pressed the pause button on pandora before going to bed. When I checked in the morning, after it hadn't gone off, I went into pandora and as it went in a beeping alarm went off (this was at about 6pm that night, so multiple hours after it should have gone off). So, I figured that the pausing had upset it, so that night I pressed the Stop button for music, instead of pausing it, but again no alarm this morning.

I SSHd in just now and there are no files in /var/log and nothing obviously related in dmesg.

Any idea how I can figure out why this is not working? I changed it tonight to add the backup alarm, so I guess I will see what happens in the morning. I've used bugle for an alarm before, although not recently, and it worked reliably.

Re: pandora alarm not going off

Hmmm, we'll look into that.

Are alarms using other music sources working?

3 (edited by finsprings 2008-10-10 07:09:18)

Re: pandora alarm not going off

Thanks. So last night I changed that alarm to turn on the backup alarm. I was out before it was due to go off but my wife told me that there was a beeping alarm when she got up, so it looks like the scheduled part is working but the turning on of the pandora part isn't.

I haven't tried other music sources as alarms (ever), but I can try that.

Re: pandora alarm not going off

OK - well, it's good that the backup is working anyway.

One thing that's different about Pandora as a service, is that, unlike, the rest of the services we support, there's an authentication step with Pandora's servers.  There was a lot of debate on whether Pandora should even be useable as an alarm because authentication adds yet another thing that can go wrong with an already complex alarm system.

Re: pandora alarm not going off

yeah ... i had an odd experience this morning ... Pandora worked as an alarm the first time my alarm went off. i snoozed it for 8 minutes and when it was supposed to go off a second time it must not have worked because i woke to the screaming beep of the backup alarm.

later in the morning i had trouble getting Pandora to work again and restarted my chumby.

so it might be a good idea to block Pandora as an alarm source. i think i am going to switch back to SHOUTcast

Re: pandora alarm not going off

OK, we'll spend some more time looking at this issue.

In the meantime, for an important alarm, please use another source and/or turn on the backup.

Thanks!

Re: pandora alarm not going off

Thanks for the reports everyone - we've identified an issue which is the likely cause of these reports and have coded in a fix.  Please give us some time to test it.  As always, the forum is the place to stay tuned for updates.

Re: pandora alarm not going off

Hi, this is Alison - I'm a Product Manager here at Chumby.

Thanks to everyone who posted/contacted us about the Pandora alarm bugs.
A new version of the Pandora is now available that will fix some of the issues relating to custom alarms sounding a beep instead of playing your Pandora channel.

There are still known bugs at this time, and we are working on them. We will update you when additional fixes are available.

In the meantime, custom alarms that use Pandora as a music source are not 100% reliable. Please use a different alarm source to ensure that you are woken up.