Firebox LCD Driver for LCDProc

dwfa

I installed pfSense 2.1.1 to fix other issues I was having and was following the instructions to get the LCD working and it seems to hang when installing lcdproc-0.5.6-i386.pbi. It has downloaded the filed and it just sits there extracting. I went to the command line and noticed bsdtar is in the state biowr (writing) and consumes about 1% constantly (seems odd).

I had no issues installing this package on 2.1. Not sure it is just my environment or not; thought I would put this out there.

EDIT:

I decided to let this run for some time. It took very long > 15mins (went for a bite to eat), is this normal?

stephenw10

Writing to the CF card can be exceptionally slow! I have experienced long delays re-installing packages though I'm not sure it was 15mins. Upgrading my test box from 2.1 to 2.1.1 took a while reload packages, including lcdproc-dev, but I'm unsure how long since I shot myself in the foot with a bad config.

Steve

dwfa

Thanks for the info. I know they can be slow; it was not this slow when I was using 2.1 - I will chalk it up to an outlier condition ;D.

power_matz

Hi.

If you set the "Refresh frequency" before you copy the conf file this value will also be used by the new driver.
May someone needs more time per screen….

stephenw10

Yes it should do. That's part of the standard lcdproc configuration independent of the driver so it'd not hard coded or anything.

Steve

A Former User

Hello,

i've just installed the lcdproc-dev package. I works so far, but after 30sek the backlight turned off.
In the webgui Services > LCDproc > Backlight > On
In the LCDd.conf is a line "Backlight=on" So it should work, but it doesn't.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

stephenw10

That's the normal behaviour.
The backlight is hardcoded to turn off. The decision to do that was based on datasheets for the LCD module in the orginal X-Core box which stated the backlight life as limited number of hours (a few years) and that many of those boxes alreday had a dead backlight. Several people have requested it be allowed to stay on, which seems reasonable given the more recent modules have led backlights with a very long life, but that hasn't made it into the code.

Steve

A Former User

Hello Steve,

thanks for your fast answer.

Too bad. I hoped, to let the backlight always on.
If i didn't use the LCDproc the backlight is always on, but it shows this annoying "Booting OS…"

pyro

ps. runnung pfsense on a X1250e

stephenw10

You could try something horrible like adding a cronjob to set the backlight on every 20s. No idea how it might interfer with the LCD driver though. :-
Or you could fork the driver and remove the code that turns it off. ;)

Steve

ridnhard19

Wow… This is crazy to see how my original proof of concept driver has taken off to a regular package and driver. I guess I lost track of all of this after mine died. It's nice to see people still using this hardware and the neat enhancements made. It's great for us as these devices are useless to many once they don't renew the licenses.

stephenw10

Hey, great to hear from you. Thank you so much for your original work. :)

Steve

cii

@pyroblast:

Hello Steve,

thanks for your fast answer.

Too bad. I hoped, to let the backlight always on.
If i didn't use the LCDproc the backlight is always on, but it shows this annoying "Booting OS…"

pyro

ps. runnung pfsense on a X1250e

I've rebuilt the code from github to force the backlight always on.

You can grab the file from https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ilykwt1p6zn4rm/sdeclcd.so, sadly Dropbox doesn't work nicely with fetch…

You'll need to drop this in /usr/pbi/lcdproc-i386/lib/lcdproc/ and chmod 555 the file. Don't forget to back up your original! Once you reboot the backlight should be on.

stephenw10

Nice. Good to have options. :)

Steve

g.jauch

@cii:

I've rebuilt the code from github to force the backlight always on.

You can grab the file from https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ilykwt1p6zn4rm/sdeclcd.so, sadly Dropbox doesn't work nicely with fetch…

You'll need to drop this in /usr/pbi/lcdproc-i386/lib/lcdproc/ and chmod 555 the file. Don't forget to back up your original! Once you reboot the backlight should be on.

Hi cii,

thx for your work… but dropbox send your sdeclcd.so as HTML-Text, not as a binary file... could you please zip your file and upload it again ?

@cii:

I've rebuilt the code from github

Can someone give me a direct link to the github sources… i searched myself but didn't find the sources :'(

cu gunther

cii

You can try this URL for a zipped version:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6133016/bsd/sdeclcd.so.zip

It was built from this repo (under FreeBSD 8.3)
https://github.com/fmertz/sdeclcd

g.jauch

works fine, the display stays on… big THX cii ;)

btw the first dropbox-link is also working now... very strange :o

cu gunther

g.jauch

Hi,

under pfsense 2.1 with the latest LCDproc-Dev driver you can configure the displayed entries via the webconfigurator inside the LCDproc Service Menu:

1. Simply navigate to the LCD-Proc Service Menu: 'Services -> LCDproc'

Click on "Enable LCDproc at startup" and change the settings as shown on the picture, like stephenw10 mentioned in this posting

2. Then click on the "Screens" Tab to see the following menu

and choose what the display should display, then click the "SAVE" button at the bottom of the page!

And your LCD become alive ;)

3. If your LCD shows only the following picture

This means that your lcdproc-client "died", happens for me on every reboot… don't know why... i will have a look inside the php-script ( lcdproc-client is really a php-shell-script )

Simple workaround... is to restart the lcdproc by hand ( 1. via command line, 2. via shellcmd )

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/lcdproc.sh restart

and all is fine... and running!

cu gunther

stephenw10

If you find a solution to that problem please tell us. :)
I have personally tried many, many modifications to the lcdproc client and start/stop scripts. None of them were very successful. That's the reason I have ended starting the client and server outside of the package system as detailed in that post.
There is a lot of discussion about it in the lcdproc-dev thread in the packages subforum.

Steve

g.jauch

@stephenw10:

If you find a solution to that problem please tell us. :)

It took me a while to find the "real" problem.

As I mentioned my problem occured only after a startup ( reboot, power on ), the LCD-Daemon is running but obviously no Client.

If you simply restart the LCDproc via /usr/local/etc/rc.d/lcdproc.sh after the boot everything is fine and stays fine!

Q: So whats wrong during the startup/system boot ???
A: Both scripts ( /usr/local/etc/rc.d/lcdproc.sh and /usr/local/pkg/lcdproc_client.php ) itself are fine!

The "real problem" is the OS… pfSense since version 2.1 has a "startup" bug!

I must take a deeper look into the the system rc-scripts/configuration.

The only thing i can tell right now is... that since pfSense 2.1 every script under /usr/local/etc/rc.d gets called twice ( with a pause of ~3 seconds ) during the system startup/boot

You can easily modify the lcdproc.sh to prevent a double start, actually there is already some code inside the "rc_start section", but this code seems not to work well!

>>> Here's a video showing the "problem/bug" <<<

stay tuned… i'll be back 8)

cu gunther

stephenw10

You'll find it gets started at least twice and that depending on what else you're loading and what speed your CPU is the resulting number of clients and servers can vary.
There is much in the lcdproc-dev thread, for example here: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=44034.msg260465#msg260465

Steve