The Raspberry Pi in the kitchen runs relatively stable, but recently the browser (which is showing the openHAB HABpanel) popped up a warning in the upper right corner. That's annoying, because this area in HABpanel shows the outside temperature.
Before investigating what's going on, I had to figure out a way to get a screenshot of the display - without running into the kitchen with my mobile phone. And without attaching a keyboard all the time (to press the "Print" button).
Continue reading "Raspberry Pi: take a screenshot from a display with no keyboard and mouse"
The openHAB HABpanel we have in the kitchen runs on a Raspberry Pi and uses a touchscreen display. The browser starts in fullscreen mode, and shows a specific HABpanel screen for this display. That's all nice, but by default the mouse cursor is in the way. Let's get rid of it.
Continue reading "Hide the mouse cursor on a Raspberry Pi"
In one of my earlier blog posts I reported that occasionally the HABpanel will disconnect from the server. Turns out it's not HABpanel, but it's the Pi itself which is causing the trouble. Part of the problem why it took me so long to investigate is that the display is in the kitchen, and someone had to have a look and spot the small red error message. To work around that problem, I hooked the device up in the network monitoring, and had an alarm triggered when the device is not reachable. Sure enough, that happens occasionally.
Because I moved /var/log to a small RAM disk to avoid wearing out the SDcard, all logs are lost once the device is rebooted. Had to bring keyboard and mouse to the kitchen in order to save the logfiles once the device was no longer reachable over the network.
Continue reading "Reboot the Raspberry Pi on network failures (brcmfmac: brcmf_cfg80211_scan: scan error -110)"
The new Raspberry display works nice, but the screen is too bright. At night in the kitchen it enlightens the entire room - unnecessarily. Since I'm using the original Raspberry Pi 7" touch display, the brightness can be controlled in /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/brightness. This "file" can hold a value from 0 (display off) to 255 (full bright).
Continue reading "Dim the Raspberry Pi screen"
The new display showing HABpanel works quite nice. But occasionally the fullscreen browser will lose the network connection. As far as I can see, it's not a Wi-Fi problem of the Raspberry Pi, but still annoying: in the morning the browser shows a small red warning that the connection to the openHAB server is lost, time is still correct, but temperature and the status of other devices is outdated. To fix that, I have to leave fullscreen mode, hit reload - and then there is no keyboard for going into fullscreen mode again (that's using the F11 key).
Continue reading "Occasional HABpanel disconnect from the openHAB server"
