Balena Fin Reset

No additional hardware. Our application is pretty simple - it scans for Bluetooth devices (with the on-board BT radio), occasionally reads data from the BT devices, and pushes the data to the cloud.

Could you add us as developers to your app so we can provision a device to it and monitor it on our side too?

Sure, but I’m not sure how to do that. Can you send me instructions on how to add you as developers? Please use this forum or my dstewart@parsyl.com email.

Just go to Members and then Invite collaborators. My username is g_florin_ionut. Add me as developer there.

Okay - give me a few minutes…

You should have access now.

Ok, thanks. I will provision a device in the following day or two and monitor it

Once you get a Balena Fin provisioned, we will need to add its UUID into our cloud and push a couple variables to the fin. Can you send me the UUID once it’s online?

Hi. I have 2 balena fin apps shared for me, both apps have the “gateway” word in their name. Which one should I be provisioning the board into?

It just occurred to me that you may not be able to reproduce the reset we are seeing. Our balena fin gateway scans for Bluetooth devices and downloads data from those devices that have data ready. In your case, you do not have our Bluetooth devices, so running our application on a balena fin will not exercise most of the code our gateway runs. We can still try this, but I’m not optimistic it will work.

I believe we shared “dev-gateway” with you. What is the second gateway you can see?

Hi, I can’t find any application called gateway-dev that’s shared with me. I only have other gateway and gateway-testapps that are shared with me and I’m not sure if those are your apps. Can you recheck please?

Yes, they are our apps, and they are about the same. Try gateway, and if that doesn’t work, gateway-test should also be fine.

Hello, I see you have a device online. I need to change some configuration variables to get it to talk with our cloud. Can you let me know when I can do that, so I won’t interrupt any tests / monitoring you are doing?

Hi there, I have pinged Florin asking him, but thinking about this, you could also set those variables on a per-device basis with Device Variables. That would not be terribly ideal if you have a large fleet, but, if it is a small enough quantity of devices you could at least make your updates without impacting Florin’s device. With that said, we also don’t want to disrupt your operations, so, we will let you know as soon as we hear back from Florin.

Sorry, yes, that’s what I meant. I would like to change some Device variables for that device so it can connect to our cloud with unique credentials, but don’t want to impact any tests you are doing.

Hi, sorry for the late reply. Feel free to add any Device variables you want.
In other news, the device I set up is up and running since I provisioned it, around 4 days ago. So it did not reboot. Did your devices in the gateway still had the reboot issues?

Hello - I just pushed the configuration values to your device. Yes, our gateways are still rebooting after anywhere from several hours to 1-2 days. I’m not sure if you will be able to reproduce this since you do not have our Bluetooth devices and your gateway will not download any data from the BT devices. Can we ship a couple of the Bluetooth devices to you? If so, what name and address should we send them to?

Hi there, do you have any watchdog or routine that reboots the device if it goes offline or if communication to USB peripherals drops in your application?

No, we don’t have any code to my knowledge that reboots the gateway. Note the reset in the earlier gateway log I attached:

[13322.534821] leds pca963x:blue: Setting an LED's brightness failed (-5)
MMC:   mmc@7e202000: 0, mmcnr@7e300000: 1
Loading Environment from FAT... WARNING at drivers/mmc/bcm2835_sdhost.c:408/bcm2835_send_command()!
WARNING at drivers/mmc/bcm2835_sdhost.c:408/bcm2835_send_command()!
*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   No ethernet found.
WARNING at drivers/mmc/bcm2835_sdhost.c:408/bcm2835_send_command()!
WARNING at drivers/mmc/bcm2835_sdhost.c:408/bcm2835_send_command()!
switch to partitions #0, OK
mmc0(part 0) is current device
Scanning mmc 0:1...
Found U-Boot script /boot.scr
437 bytes read in 2 ms (212.9 KiB/s)

This is very different from an OS or application-induced reset that looks more like:

[  246.328962] systemd-journald[827]: Received SIGTERM from PID 1 (systemd-shutdow).
...
[  247.025287] BT: mmc2:0001:2: cannot remain alive while host is shutdown
[  247.063394] reboot: Restarting system

Before arranging how we can reproduce the issue locally, I would like to perform an additional inspection of a device that has rebooted, do you have any online I can access?