I am also having some freezing on my chumby and other intermittent issues. Most of my freezing comes when it is playing a photo widget (Flickr and Photobucket). The chumby will get stuck on a photo. Sometimes I can go into the control panel and reload the channel, other times I have to change channels and then go back and then on occasion I have to power cycle the unit as I can not even get into the control panel. I am running the beta control panel on this unit, but have not heard of any confirmed issues with the beta or the current firmware that would cause these types of issues.

Other times I will have certain widgets stop updating information while other widgets keep working fine (so I know the connection is still good).

Like you I am hoping a new control panel or firmware will solve these issues. It would be nice to see what if any stability issues are being resolved in any future updates - just to know that they are recognized as issues and if they have been reproduced.

Duane,

Thanks for the response. Is this logfile stored in non-volatile memory? IE if I have to reboot my chumby to recover from a freeze will the information still be available? I am starting to think that in least my case the problem could be related to the custom alarms. Here is my resoning.

I now have two Chumbies, one at home and one at work. The unit at home has a custom alarm that changes the channel to photobucket at 10:00 AM. I do not get home until later that evening, so this is more so the wife can see some pictures. At some point in the day it will freeze. My chumby at work does not have any custom alarms and it has been running the PhotoBucket widget for 2+ hours now without any issue. Now this could also point to a hardware issue as well as I have not tried the custom alarms on my work unit to see.

EDIT>>

This was the first time I have done anything with the SSH stuff, so I get it now. This is just basically spitting out a running log of activity, so I will setup a computer at home to log this information and hopefully it will help debug this issue. As I am not a software guy, do you want me to send the log file to you? Also do you have any recommended SSH tools to capture this log?

Duane,

I let the capture run for several hours on my home unit and was able to capture the freeze on Photobucket. I am not a software type of guy so this log does not mean too much to me. I have an almost 4 Mb text file (zips up to less than 300kb) that I can email to you if you want or I can try to post areas of the log that seem to be of interest.

To give you some background I left it on the "Default" channel when I set it up, there is a custom alarm at 10:00 AM to change to the photo bucket channel and it appears to start having problems around 10:27. I start seeing a bunch of "MemoryObject::Alloc(0x40a2b5d4) rejected request for 49 blocks (1568K)" start popping up, they occur more and more frequently over the next few minutes but then seems to get over run with errors at 10:30 but is still chugging along at this point getting more and more errors. By 10:56 it completely stopped loading images.

Thanks for any help.

Duane,

Did you receive the zip file? If so can you provide me any feedback on what might have been found. I had a similar freeze on the myspace widget while flipping through photos. I have not captured a log of this one yet, but will try to get to it as soon as I can.

I had a feeling it was a memory issue by the looks of the log file. Thanks for the update. As always if there is anything I can do to help please let me know. Hopefully you are correct and the upcoming firmware release will solve these issues. I will try to wait patiently.

I personally do not think it is a hardware build defect. I have two units which are behaving the same way. I would think that a memory leak is strictly a software/firmware issue and not a hardware design or defect issue. I am not a software guy so this is pure speculation, but a wikipedia search on "memory leak" results with "In computer science, a memory leak is a particular kind of unintentional memory consumption by a computer program where the program fails to release memory when no longer needed. This condition is normally the result of a bug in a program that prevents it from freeing up memory that it no longer needs." So an update to the software or firmware should be able to fix this.

Duane please correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think there is anything wrong with the hardware design or build that could cause this problem. Usually hardware either works or it doesn't - not works for a while and then stops, works again with a soft reboot then dies again.

As for there not being too many similiar reports, it seems that the photo widgets are the big contributing factor. Mine locks up on the photo widget after 1-2 hours. I am not sure how many users leave the Chumby running on photos for hours on end. So that may limit the exposure of this issue. I am going to setup a few custom alarms to switch out of the photo widget every 30 minutes or so and then back and see if this clears up the memory leak.

Last night my chumby had a BSOD... well black screen of death...  The screen went black and when I pushed the top button it turned solid white.  I had to reboot it.  Will my alarm still work when this happens?

I am VERY happy to report that with the new firmware the problem I was having is gone. I have let the Photobucket widget run all day without a single lockup.

Thank you!!!

I have tried to capture the same types of logs as before, but whenever I try it never freezes up. I've been capturing a log for the last 3 days and no hickups at all. Does starting the control panel with the logs do anything different?

Thanks, but no  - we've reproduced some of these really long-term freezes and are working on solutions.  These are the most tedious to address because they take so long to manifest.