No longer able to connect to astrobox

AstroBox Troubleshooting
#1

EDIT: Apparently a second flash of the SD card and posting a question to the forum scares everything into working. Its working well now, but any ideas what happened?

My Astroprint was working great…

I unplugged the power from the wall to switch power supplies. I didn’t properly shut it down, I just pulled the plug.

When I plugged it back in, nothing would happen. The light on the “official edimax wifi dongle” didnt flash, and the screen on the printer would turn on.

I flashed the SD card and tried to start from fresh again. After a couple minutes the light on the edimax started flashing again, but I cannot find the hotspot on my PC or my phone. The screen on the printer does come on.

I am running a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

Any ideas whats going on?

#2

Ha! Not sure…But at least it’s working! :grin:

By the way, I’ve pulled the plug many many times and have never run into any issues.

Maybe you had Serial Logs turned on and it filled up the Astrobox? I dunno.

#3

While in most cases pulling the plug will be ok, like with any Linux device, cutting power on the device without doing a software shutdown has a small but real chance of filesystem corruption.

For the next release we have implemented a shutdown icon and a notice that will be shown on the reboot after a power loss.

Hopefully this will prevent more users from inadvertently corrupting their file systems.

#4

@Daniel While I understand the delma - I’ll put on my Sr SRE hat on for a second - this is an embedded device - it should withstand being able to be shut down and turned back on, perhaps a better recovery schema is required.

I struggle with Astroprint, it’s a great tool, but I lost internet this morning - now tell me why I have to log into half my printers to re-establish the wifi connection - seems like if the wifi connection isn’t there, a cron should be retrying automatically.

#5

It DOES try to reconnect multiple times, then eventually, it fails.

#6

So, if I loose internet for a day, my astroprint looses it’s wifi settings? Why does it ever fail?

#7

Giving up on tying to connect to our server after a while is correct but forgetting the WiFi settings is not desired behavior. We will look into this

#8

@Jeremy_Proffitt: I made a mistake and misread your post.

I was talking about reconnecting to our servers, NOT WiFi.

#9

Well, both should be robust enough to reconnect within 15-30 minutes of being back up. My bigger issue is that multiple astrobox’s actually lost their wifi settings.

I’m an SRE at a huge dot com, so my life revolves around reliability. I’ve seen multiple issues with communication when it works, it’s great, but it’s fault tolerance isn’t so great. If you point me to the code that retries the wifi and the server connection, I’m happy to write a patch.