26 (edited by victorgator 2009-12-27 16:07:57)

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

The "control panel freeze" happens to my Chumby everytime I have used it, approximately 10-15 times.  After much frsutration, I am opting to return my Chumby One to the manufacturer to receive a refund of my money.  Thanks to those who have been helpful to me here and good luck to others experiencing this problem.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Wow, with that, I'm pretty surprised to see so little recent response in this thread from any devs...

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Needless to say, since many folks are still out for the holidays, the rate of response is going to be slower than usual.

We're still looking into it - so far it's been hard to reproduce reliably here.  For instance, someone in QA has seen it, but I never have.

The current suspicion is that it's not related to the top button at all, but something related to leaving widget mode to the main Control Panel screen, possibly one of the indicators, such as wifi signal strength.

One thing that's apparently the case - you should *not* be running the "beta" control panel, since its designed for use with the classic chumby, not the chumby one, which is already running something newer.  It's also possible that attempts to use an external keyboard can confuse the system about the frame buffer.

We'll say more when we know more, and it's one of our highest priority items to address.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

... Ouh, yeah, that's right. The Beta control panel. I think I clicked that a while ago and totally forgot... lol

Yeah, I'll be switching that off! Thanks for the tip...

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Anyone running the beta Control Panel and experiencing problems should revert to the normal one.

By definition, the beta software is not production quality, and is pretty much *guaranteed* to have issues.  If you have problems, they should be reported in the "beta" section of the forum, not in the main section.  You should only use the beta software if you're willing to put up with possible bugs and instability for a chance to test new features.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

I am not using the beta control panel on my CC or my C1.  If I get some chumby time tomorrow while at work, I'll look at reproducing the failure with detailed steps.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Thanks Materdaddy - that would be extremely helpful.  I'd love to be able to track this one down as quickly as possible.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Well, went back to the regular control panel, and mine just froze up on me again.

If I remember correctly, here's the things I've done:
Switched control panel -> hidden options -> "Off" -> rebooted (uses "alternate" long intro using the "magic file") -> plug USB keyboard (brought up console) -> played with plug/unplugging the keyboard with various combinations of pushing/not pushing the top button to see what happens; it always did something when I hit the button but I don't specifically remember what -> played widgets for a while -> Music -> Pandora -> started playing -> went back to widgets. It's been playing widgets and Pandora for about the past hour. I hit the button to go back and thumb-up a song (a really involved process, by the way... *sigh*), and I got bupkis, no control panel. Widgets froze.

I tried tapping the area of the screen the "hide control panel" button would be at, and I didn't get a response. It unjammed and continued to play widgets, I'd say about 30 seconds later. My next mash of the button brought up the control panel as it should...

Hope this helps!

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Duane's comment about the WiFi signal strength indicator is interesting...I was having the same "can't return to Control Panel" problem along with poor WiFi performance (dropouts in music playback).  I put a 2nd wireless access point much closer to my Chumby One trying to fix the WiFi performance problem, and now that I think of it I haven't seen the Control Panel problem since then...

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Here's something to try - the Control Panel has an Easter Egg to create a small invisible on-screen hotspot that performs the same function as the top button to exit widget mode and return to the main screen of the Control Panel:

A simple procedure to enable the hotspot:

1) SSH into the chumby per the instructions on the chumby wiki
2) perform the commands:

echo 0,0 > /psp/hotspot
stop_control_panel
start_control_panel

This puts the hotspot in the upper left corner of the screen.

If the hotspot works, but the top button doesn't, then we can focus our attention on the button.  If neither works, then it might be something else.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Duane wrote:

Here's something to try - the Control Panel has an Easter Egg to create a small invisible on-screen hotspot that performs the same function as the top button to exit widget mode and return to the main screen of the Control Panel:

A simple procedure to enable the hotspot:

1) SSH into the chumby per the instructions on the chumby wiki
2) perform the commands:

echo 0,0 > /psp/hotspot
stop_control_panel
start_control_panel

This puts the hotspot in the upper left corner of the screen.

If the hotspot works, but the top button doesn't, then we can focus our attention on the button.  If neither works, then it might be something else.

Thanks for the tip, I added it to the wiki's Magic_files.  I'll let you know if I can reproduce the problem, and if it has anything to do with the button itself.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

I'd like to know what widgets you guys have in your channel.  We might want to check to see if there's a specific widget(s) that is exacerbating the problem.

38 (edited by Materdaddy 2009-12-28 12:07:23)

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Well, finally got it to reproduce the behavior.  I think it has to do with pandora (or other music sources).

I tried many different combinations of pressing the bend sensor, plugging/unplugging, while the control panel framebuffer was showing, widgets, letting the CP time out and flip from the terminal fb back, etc. and was unable to reproduce the problem.

I am not too sure of the "exact" steps this time because of giving up the different combinations and now I came back from lunch and it's "frozen" on the terminal framebuffer.  I'm sorry I don't have better steps, but I'm posting just in case it helps the Chumbians track this one down...  I *think* the steps to reproduce will be start up Pandora, and leave it on the pandora player.  Plug in the keyboard, and do nothing for a while.  Come back, the framebuffer is still set to the terminal, but the control panel is confused.  Pressing the bend sensor does nothing, but is logged in flash: 2009-12-28 11:57:12 TRACE: BendSensor.onKeyUp(): getCode=36.  This is because the player is in a music source, which does nothing when the bend sensor is pressed.  When unplugging the keyboard, the widget framebuffer comes up with a static image of the last thing drawn to it, leaving people to think it's frozen.

The reason I figured this out was having logging enabled, with the terminal showing, I pressed the upper-left corner hoping the hotspot would log another bend sensor event and instead saw this:

2009-12-28 11:59:24 TRACE: CreateStation.open() false                                                                                                                                                                            
2009-12-28 11:59:24 TRACE: Creating keyboard                                                                                                                                                                                     
2009-12-28 11:59:24 TRACE: _level0.controlPanel.musicPanel.instance893.panel_holder.panel.createStation.EnterMusicSearch.textInput                                                                                               
2009-12-28 11:59:24 TRACE: setting input to:                                                                                                                                                                                     

I think Pandora is still up in the control panel frame buffer, and pressing the upper left it's trying to create a station.

In case any of this is interesting:

chumby:/proc/driver/chumbyfwfb# for file in *; do echo ${file}:; cat ${file}; done
alpha:
0x0
enable:
0
fb2_alpha:
0x0
fb3_alpha:
0xff
fb_stats:
PXP frequency:          31 Hz
LCDIF frequency:        60 Hz
VSYNC Edge IRQs:        738164
Cur Frame Done IRQs:    743422
Missed PXP firings:     829
key:
0x000000
key_en:
0
pxp_lock:
0

I've left my chumby in this state in case anybody wants more proc entries or things poked.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Cool - can you do the following:

Try the command "switch_fb.sh 1" and let us know what happens.

This *should* switch out the terminal overlay for the Control Panel overlay, however, the terminal will still be alive.  You should be able to bring back the terminal with "switch_fb.sh 3".

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Duane wrote:

Cool - can you do the following:

Try the command "switch_fb.sh 1" and let us know what happens.

This *should* switch out the terminal overlay for the Control Panel overlay, however, the terminal will still be alive.  You should be able to bring back the terminal with "switch_fb.sh 3".

Ha, that was the command I didn't want to run in case you had something more fun like some sort of environment dump of the flash player, but yeah switching frame buffers using that fixes it for me.  The Pandora create new station dialog was up on frame buffer 1 as expected from the logs.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Ok, so the "not responding" problem I've seen is easy to reproduce:

1) Go to a control panel screen that ignores bend presses, i.e. alarms, music, channels, etc.
2) Insert a USB keyboard. udev will show you framebuffer 3 (console)
3) Unplug said USB keyboard. udev is not smart enough to return you to framebuffer 1 (control panel), it instead takes you to framebuffer 0, which looks like a frozen widget.

Not sure if this is the same as others have seen, although at least myself and FalconFour were playing with USB keyboards when we've noticed this type of behavior.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

I have this exact same problem and I just got it out of the box literally 10 minutes ago. It updated itself wirelessly. I was streaming internet radio and a number of cam based streams cycled through. I could interact with one of them that lets you switch cameras via the screen, but I could not call the main control panel back up w/o power cycling.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

OK, after talking to ChumbyLurker, I think we have an explanation for the case where people are hooking up external keyboards, since it appears the service that handles may be incorrectly managing the frame buffers.  If we're right, that's a pretty straightforward fix.  Materdaddy seems to have exposed that one pretty definitively.

The trick now is to figure out if the problem that is manifesting when people are *not* plugging in keyboards is actually the same bug.  The symptoms are suspiciously similar so it's definitely the place to start.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

I know I really don't have that much experience with it, but the whole situation is just *screaming* framebuffer management! lol

Really, just giving the button a different sort of functionality - instead of a one-way button to the control panel, making a "toggle" between widgets and control panel, would both improve intuitive functionality _and_ fix the framebuffer-select problem! That sounds like a win-win to me... wink

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

I wonder if the PXP has stopped working.  I noticed a memory corruption issue when getting Android working that was causing the PXP to not get run, but I could only get it to happen with Android (which does some major fbdev voodoo).

To anyone who can reproduce this problem without plugging in a USB keyboard: Can you enable SSH and connect to the chumby One, then run the following command when you experience the frozen control panel or widget:

regutil -w HW_PXP_CTRL_SET=1

That will kick the PXP, which is responsible for compositing the widget's output with the controlpanel's output, and cause it to display a single frame.  Normally it gets kicked 30 times a second (or so), but I suspect the thing that's responsible for kicking it may have broken.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Just wanted to chime in and say I too am having this problem with my Chumby One that I just received for xmas.
Hoping a firmware fix does the trick!
Good luck folks.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

Okay, here's another symptom. Like I said before, definitely framebuffer-related, but this may have revealed more...

- Started fbcgi as a precaution.
- Various tasks... (I know, sorry...)
- Hit the top button out of sheer curiosity while it's cycling through widgets. This time it was on the scrolling NYT Technology widget. It stopped scrolling right when I hit the button. But that was it - it just stopped.
- I hit up the fbcgi page (chumby/cgi-bin/custom/fb1) and it showed the Control Panel. I F5'd and the signal indicator changed - clearly, that was the one that was running.
- I tapped the part of the screen where the "Hide control panel" button would be, and F5'd the fbcgi page. Now the framebuffer is blank (all black) with only my clock-hack showing. But the widget on screen is still frozen.
- The widgets unfroze seconds later, but instead of unjamming the one I was on, it switched to the next one. Perhaps it was already at the bottom of the scrolling list, I didn't check.
- Hit the control panel button again and it works fine.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

ChumbyLurker wrote:

I wonder if the PXP has stopped working.  I noticed a memory corruption issue when getting Android working that was causing the PXP to not get run, but I could only get it to happen with Android (which does some major fbdev voodoo).

To anyone who can reproduce this problem without plugging in a USB keyboard: Can you enable SSH and connect to the chumby One, then run the following command when you experience the frozen control panel or widget:

regutil -w HW_PXP_CTRL_SET=1

That will kick the PXP, which is responsible for compositing the widget's output with the controlpanel's output, and cause it to display a single frame.  Normally it gets kicked 30 times a second (or so), but I suspect the thing that's responsible for kicking it may have broken.

I think you're exactly right about the PXP not compositing the output.  I finally experienced the (non usb keyboard) "freeze".  Running

regutil -w HW_PXP_CTRL_SET=1

will get one update to the screen... but again it seems "frozen".  Repeatedly running that command would update the display as I navigated (touching things in the CP, and toggling framebuffers using the bend sensor).

The really strange part: in the time it took to find this thread and type this response, everything started working like normal again.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

OK, this is very useful information, and is consistent with everything we've heard about this issue.

Thanks - now we'll get to work on a fix.

Re: Control Panel Not Accessable

I know you're all busy at CES, but I got this "freeze" again, kicked the pxp a few hundred times and seems back to normal.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker