BalenaOS on Raspberry Pi 4B chooses wrong video mode - DELL E156FPb

BelanaOS chooses the wrong video mode for my monitor, resulting in it permanently displaying “Cannot Display This Video Mode” and beneath that “Optimum resolution 1024X768 60Hz”. I am unable to query the Pi for the current video mode since tvservice is not included in BalenaOS.

Hi @andrum99, and welcome to the forums. You are able to modify the video mode on the Raspberry Pi via config.txt that resides in the boot partition https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/video.md. You will find this file in the resin-boot partition when you mount the SD card or /mnt/boot/config.txt on the device.

Have you tried adjusting any configuration variables for the video mode?

It’s also worth noting that you can get the Raspbian userland in a container using the balenalib/raspberrypi3 base image. SSH’ing into the container via balena ssh uuid.local main I was able to run tvservice -v successfully which may help you debug.

It’s also worth noting that you can get the Raspbian userland in a container using the balenalib/raspberrypi3 base image.

Thanks - it wasn’t obviously how to get a “normal” Raspberry Pi userland under BalenaOS - it seems it is JeOS to run Docker. It also wouldn’t let me SSH in from the local network.

Have you tried adjusting any configuration variables for the video mode?

No. I won’t be using BalenaOS, since I was just quickly looking at to it run BalenaSound so I could set up a Pi as a Bluetooth audio player and couldn’t get it to work - I got no sound out of the Pi using Balena Sound. I’m going back to Raspbian, since that works almost out of the box, with some fairly minor tweaks to get the A2DP profile activated, and the bluealsa audio sink running.

Note that I have had no problems with the Pi selecting the wrong video mode under Raspbian or Ubuntu 19.10 Server, so BalenaOS must be doing something different.

Regarding the SSH issues, are you running a production or development image - the former will require an SSH key to be included in config.json whereas a development image allows password-less root access. What errors, if any, are you seeing? There’s more detail here: https://www.balena.io/os/docs/raspberrypi4-64/getting-started/#Poking-Around-balenaOS

OK, just let us know if you require anything else as we’d be happy to help you debug your balenaSound issue. To your earlier point, yes balenaOS is specifically designed for running Docker containers on embedded devices.

Thanks - I’ve actually succesfully tested what I was attempting to test, as I wanted to see how the Bluetooth pairing worked on Balena Sound as I wasn’t sure what Secure Simple Pairing actually was. It seems that’s just the name for Bluetooth pairing where it doesn’t ask you for a code, which appears to be how my Bluetooth mouse does its pairing. I need to deploy a Bluetooth audio sink as part of an existing music player that currently runs Raspbian, and has other stuff on it, including ZFS, which I had to compile myself due to, as far as I can fathom, religious reasons.

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