PADD from balena-pihole project does not work with pitft 2.8"

Project help
1

Hi!
I am running balena-pihole project which includes PADD on my raspberry pi 3 using balena cloud and following these instructions. The pihole+dnscrypt-proxy work as expected except of PADD which is supposed to automatically run when it detects the pitft display.

For PADD setup following these instructions but using adafruit 2.8" capacitive pitft display instead of Adafruit 3.5" resistive pitft display.

Here are the instructions for enabling driver of the mentioned pitft 2.8" display (just from another project): https://github.com/balena-io-projects/balena-wpe#capacitive-touchscreen. The configuration of both these displays, as we can see actually, looks almost the same.

The display seems to work well after adding the following balena vars:

RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_gpu_mem  =  64
RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_dtoverlay  =  pitft28-capacitive,rotate=270,speed=25000000,fps=20
RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_cvt  =  320 240 60 1 0 0 0
RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_force_hotplug  = 1
RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_group  = 4
RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_mode  =  87

I expect PADD to appear on the pitft display automatically after adding the configuration variables in BalenaCloud app and rebooting the pi. Am I wrong? Do I need to do any additional configurations which are not mentioned in the PADD setup instructions?

What actually happens: after booting pi the screen is white with the Balena Logo, then after I see in pihole application logs Starting PADD the screen turns black, but no text is visible.

Please help to make PADD work with the mentioned display.
Thank you.

2

Hey @drew,

Welcome to the forums!

From the settings you provided, it looks like you set RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_group=4 while it should be set to 2. Can you try setting RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_group=2 and see if PADD appears on the TFT display?

Let us know if it works for you.
Cheers,
Rahul

4

Thank you @rahul-thakoor for reply!
I have tried that and it did not work. Once I changed the value of RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_hdmi_group from 4 to 2, the screen is still just black. Seems like it changed nothing. But thank you anyway for trying to help! Any other suggestions?

5

Hello,
I don’t have this screen so I’m just guessing
The project you mentioned uses RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_dtoverlay=pitft28-capacitive,rotate=90,speed=62000000,fps=60, not RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_dtoverlay=pitft28-capacitive,rotate=270,speed=25000000,fps=20

9

Hey there @drew

After a bit of digging we’ve found this to be an issue introduced sometime after balenaOS 2.38; if you flash your device with that version it should work OK.

I’ve created an issue to track this: https://github.com/balena-os/meta-balena/issues/1772

1 Like
10

Ok, seems like you are right! balenaOS 2.38 does not have this problem. Just curious, is this planned to be fixed in the next balenaOS release or later? Thank you!

11

Hello,
There’s about a 2-3 week release cycle for balenaOS, and since this is a new issue it won’t likely make it into the next release. It’s on the radar now though, and I would think it might be addressed in a month or so. I’d recommend checking back in about that time, though feel free to ask for an update of course!

13

Hi there! I am an OP and just decided to update to current 2.47.01rev (supervisor: 10.6.27) and my PADD stopped working - after reboot just white screen. Could anyone confirm that current issue with pitft displays was fixed, or should I revert back to 2.38? Thank you.

14

Hello @drew, the issue (https://github.com/balena-os/meta-balena/issues/1772) still appears to be open, so I would revert back to version 2.38 for the time being. I’ll see about getting an updated estimate added to the issue as well.

17

Hi @alanb128. Weird enough, but after I reverted to 2.38, I see the same issue, as the one I have described above - white screen, no balena logo, no PADD… In fact, in logs I see the following:

14.04.20 12:17:28 (+0300)  pihole  /dev/fb1 not found. Disabling fbcp & PADD

So it seems like it does not detect pitft or something and pihole automatically disables PADD…

Now I am confused. Please help me to get my piftf display work with balena again.

UPDATE:
Another strange thing I have noticed is that I can not ssh to my host os using UI:
Screen Shot 2020-04-14 at 12.28.25 PM

Although I am able to do it with

balena ssh 192.168.2.2
root@6e832ec:~#

Something weird happens((

18

Ok, sorry, I got it… That’s just me, being idiot. I forgot to set RESIN_HOST_CONFIG_gpu_mem config variable… Still exploring.

19

No worries!
We’ll update this thread once the attached github issue gets resolved

21

Cool. Thank you very much! Still have the issue with Terminal connection to Host OS in Balena Cloud web UI, as described higher((

22

hey @drew if you grant support access (see the actions menu of the device) for your device and send me your device UUID in a private message I can have a quick look to see why perhaps the webterminal doesn’t work.

25

Hi @shaunmulligan! I apologize for such a late response - I simply missed the message. No worries, it’s already working… I guess after some update. Still thank you very much for your help attempt!