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kaimcbride avatar image
kaimcbride asked

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B 1.1 Hangs

I have a Pi 2 Model B that I have connected to my BMV-702 and Blue Solar 100/30 MPPT with Ve.Direct USB cables. The problem I am having is that somewhere within 24 to 48 hours I find that it has stopped logging to Victron Connect and is completely unresponsive. I power cycle it and it starts right back up and works for another 24 to 48 hours.

I have tried running Venus Images v2.73, v2.92, and just installed large-v2.94. The different versions haven't made a difference. There are no errors in the system logs, it just stops.

I connect over WiFi.

I thought of putting in a cron job to reboot the Raspberry Pi every day at midnight, but the root filesystem is readonly and I wasn't able to create a crontab (maybe there is a workaround for this?)

This has been low priority for me over the last couple of years, but I am now planning on having an electric hot water heater powered up as a dump load after the MPPT goes into Absorption each morning. I can run this from the BMV-702 relay, but would like to have more options for other services using the Venus + Raspberry Pi (and maybe even Node-RED).

Questions: Is a Raspberry Pi 2 the likely culprit? Perhaps underpowered for running VenusOS, or some hardware flaw? Should I upgrade the hardware? Any way to install a crontab or get the Pi to reboot nightly w/out a crontab? Other troubleshooting suggestions for finding out why this Pi 2 can't run for more than a day or two?

thank you!


-kai


Venus OSRaspberry Pi
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3 Answers
chuckenglehart avatar image
chuckenglehart answered ·

I also have VenusOS on a Pi2B with the same issue. I think it came down to power savings settings for the WiFi card, but I wasn't able to solve it properly.

There is a built in way to do what you were considering via cron. This is what I've been using and it gets the job done.

Open the Remote Console:

Settings-> VRM Online Portal -> Reboot Device When No Contact

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kaimcbride avatar image kaimcbride commented ·
Thank you for the reply! I vaguely remembered seeing something 2yrs ago when I first looked into this issue that mentioned the WiFi card, but I couldn't find it again.


I just enabled the "Reboot Device When No Contact" and hope that will be the answer.

fingers crossed.

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kevgermany avatar image
kevgermany answered ·

@kaimcbride

@chuckenglehart

Moved to modifications space.

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Kevin Windrem avatar image
Kevin Windrem answered ·

There's a shell script you can run to remount the root fs as read-write:

/opt/victronenergy/swupdate-scripts/remount-rw.sh

You can then create your cron job.

The problem with setting up cron tasks is they won't survive a firmware update. There are ways to set things up using /data/rc.local which is executed during boot.

Another way to do this is to create a service that runs as a background process and does the reboot. For examples, look at /opt/victronenergy/service. Or look at my SetupHelper package which creates a service.

https://github.com/kwindrem/SetupHelper

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kaimcbride avatar image kaimcbride commented ·
Kevin,

Great information, thank you. I knew there must be some method for mounting read-write. whew. If this Raspberry Pi can reliably stay running everyday I feel more confident in automating tasks with it.

I took a quick look at SetupHelper, thanks for sharing.

-kai

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