Debugging Wallpanel terminating

WallPanel
#1

Hey folks,

Firstly, thanks for the work to keep WallPanel going!

I’ve got a Home Assistant setup for which I’m using WallPanel as an alarm/status panel. I’ve been using it on a 5th gen Kindle Fire (old kids’ tablet no longer in use). I’ve been finding that after a while (12-36 hours) it seems to exit out and I have to hit the power button to wake the tablet back up/get back into WallPanel.

I’d assumed that was due to the dusty FireOS and relatively low memory available of such a vintage tablet, or perhaps the random Amazon notifications I’d still get through it. I actually picked up another Fire of the same vintage (to fit my wall mount), rooted, and installed a Fire Nexus rom build for something a little leaner. I got WallPanel going on it, and…I still have a similar problem with it dropping out.

I’m configuring it to monitor my hadashboard, sign on to MQTT for audio alerts (Door chime, voice notifications, etc), and have the clock screensaver active. I do have the camera enabled - motion detection to turn off the screensaver works great when it’s still running.

Is there any log information I can get at to tell why it’s crashing or exiting out? If not, any ideas how to debug such a thing? I guess getting set up for a local build & just running it with ADB attached to see if it reproduces – just thought I’d check if there was a better route before going there.

Thanks,

- Joe
1 Like
#2

I have a similar behavior on my Fire OS 7, it seems to happen because the OS is cleaning up long running applications, so its either putting the app in the background or closing them.

I have no way to address this since Fire OS is a custom OS and I am doubtful Amazon cares to fix this behavior. Just check to be sure you have full charge and that the WiFi connection is not getting killed by the OS.

There is no log information in the app, but I do log crashes in Firebase, but this is not a crash issue, so nothing gets reported. This is garbage collection by the OS, that is my assessment.

#3

Thanks for the reply…Some sort of garbage collection would make a lot of sense.

Do you see this on non-FireOS tablets too? I’d grabbed both LineageOS and Nexus OS builds for my Fire, likewise thinking it good to get the Amazon cruft out of the way. The build on there now is pretty light – no play store, no amazon apps, etc. That said, I misspoke about it running Nexus – it was running LineageOS. Seems worth reimaging to Nexus anyway to see if it’s still an issue there. This is all I want the tablet to do, so bare OS + WallPanel is ultimately the desired state…

Thanks and regards,

- Joe
#4

Mister,

Have you considered restarting the app periodically, to avoid the OS thinking you are such a long running program. A daily scheduled restart say at 1am would scarcely be noticed.

I’ve not used it, but this library by Jake Wharton whose other stuff I have used, should help:

#5

Some progress…I’m up ~36 hrs after reimaging to LineageOS 14.1 from a 12 build. The latest Nexus build is apparently stripped down to the point of not having a web browser (or any app besides clock) in the image itself. For some reason I was not able to use adb to load on Wallpanel there – gave up after a few attempts.

One other change I realized is I hadn’t turned the video camera back on. Once I’m satisfied the current configuration is stable I’ll turn that and motion detection back on. Maybe the fire tablets just don’t agree with the camera being on 24x7. If that gets restart-y again maybe I’ll stick a ssh server on there and see if there’s anything I can monitor remotely. (Temperatures? Memory usage?) If it remains stable, apparently something in the other OS image was still getting in the way.

I’ll update with more data either way. Older Kindles are pretty cheap and easy to come by, so they’re very tempting for applications like this.

#6

And just updating for posterity…things are still working fine. Turned back on video for motion detection, and that’s been going more than a day.

So, FireOS and Lineage 12.1 ran into the returning-to-lock-screen behavior after some number of hours running. Lineage 14.1 seems to be working great.

Glad to be able to successfully reuse an older cheapie kids Fire tablet – thanks again!