Firebox LCD Driver for LCDProc

dwfa · Jan 26, 2014, 8:11 PM

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 · Jan 31, 2014, 10:41 PM

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 · Feb 1, 2014, 1:57 AM

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

Feb 15, 2014, 1:49 PM

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 · Feb 15, 2014, 1:59 PM

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

Feb 15, 2014, 2:12 PM

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 · Feb 15, 2014, 2:28 PM

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 · Mar 21, 2014, 8:42 PM

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 · Mar 22, 2014, 10:31 AM

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

Steve

cii · Apr 9, 2014, 9:18 PM

@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 · Apr 10, 2014, 12:19 PM

Nice. Good to have options. :)

Steve

g.jauch · Apr 11, 2014, 5:49 PM

@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 · Apr 11, 2014, 6:54 PM

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 · Apr 11, 2014, 8:12 PM

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 · Apr 13, 2014, 7:39 AM

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 · Apr 12, 2014, 10:40 PM

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 · Apr 16, 2014, 2:05 PM

@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 · Apr 16, 2014, 1:59 PM

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

g.jauch · Apr 16, 2014, 2:26 PM

@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

Hi steve,

I updated my previous posting… I forgot the video link!

This problem/bug has nothing to do with LCDproc !!!

I made a simple test script t.sh... and put it under /usr/local/etc/rc.d/
The script simply redirect it's output to a file under /tmp/debug_log.txt

Inside the script i only call the 'date' command and echo the $1 value !!!

Both VM's are fresh installed from the LiveCD... Quick Install, Standard Kernel, no changes!

Under 2.03 the script is processed/called 1 time ( which is correct ) under 2.1 ( and above ) it's processed/called 2 times during the startup !

Why is my script called twice... this doesn't make any sense to me ???

cu gunther

stephenw10 · Apr 16, 2014, 4:12 PM

Yes, interesting. I think in fact most of the investigative work done in the lcdproc-dev thread was before 2.1 was even in beta.
One thing to note is that the package system will restart all the packages if an interface goes down or up which can be a problem during boot. It should not do that IMHO. Another thing is that the lcdproc rc script issues a killall for the server and client so even if three clients have been started (which I've seen) they are all killed. Another thing is that the first instance of LCDd is 'un-killable' such that it doesn't get killed by the script and a new instance is started but fails because it can't attch to the parallel port.
Also of note is that we removed the loop script that continually restarted the server and client if it wasn't running. This seemed completely superfluous in 2.0 but since then a time limit on php processes has been introduced (I think) so that the php client will eventually die.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that this is only a problem with the sdeclcd driver. Users with other LCD types run lcdproc-dev without any issues.

Steve