My headless zynthian seems to error on boot up when there are several peripherals plugged in. Taking these out, successfully booting and then plugging them back in seems to work. Anything I can check to see what’s going wrong? I wondered if it might be due to initial power draw and start up, but no idea really. Config is: RPi 5 (with recommended 27W power supply), Touchscreen 2, Behringer UMC202HD audio interface, Novation Launch Control XL and CME WIDI uhost.
You might be able to find out if a specific peripheral is causing a problem by testing with removing them individually rather than all at once.
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Yes fair point, I’ve just rebooted from none-1-2-3-4 peripherals plugged back in and it’s no longer erroring. It definitely doesn’t like it when the audio interface isn’t plugged in, presumably as nothing else is configured for audio out (there’s no DAC hat) but that doesn’t explain the error earlier.
I think this command shows the UI error log (which I can’t access because plugging in my touchscreen, for some reason is disabling the web interface)
journalctl -u zynthian
and the warnings/errors reported now are…
Jan 09 15:14:02 zynthian startx[1063]: WARNING:zynthian_autoconnect.start_alsa_in: Failed to set U192k aliases
Jan 09 15:14:03 zynthian startx[1063]: WARNING:zynthian_gui_brightness_config.init_ctrls: Can’t set display brightness!
Jan 09 15:14:03 zynthian startx[1063]: WARNING:zynthian_autoconnect.start_alsa_out: Failed to set U192k aliases
Jan 09 15:14:04 zynthian startx[1063]: ERROR:zynthian_autoconnect.auto_connect_thread: ZynAutoConnect ERROR: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘options’
Jan 09 15:22:02 zynthian startx[1063]: WARNING:zynthian_gui.busy_thread_task: Clients have been busy for longer than 30s: {‘set_chain_state’, ‘add_processor’, ‘load snapshot’, ‘ui startup’}
Zynthian requires an available sound card during startup, which is currently configured via webconf. Since I used to frequently switch sound cards, I developed a habit of reconfiguring the sound card to the Raspberry Pi’s internal audio before making any changes. Looking at the options in webconf now, I would probably choose the “dummy device” option instead.
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Dummy does allow boot without any soundcard and hotplug audio means you can add USB audio. There are caveats though. The latency is likely to be higher and until today (in Vangelis) there were duplicate entries for the Dummy device. Also, you don’t get audio level controls. I want a system that can use hotplug audio completely but it is likely to be suboptimal. It is advised to configure with a proper audio interface as the primary device.
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Another twist on this, it’s now started up ok with all the peripherals plugged in many, many times - yesterday I was debugging a touch screen issue and restarting it frequently without problem - but once that issue was solved I tried to Remove All, Remove Chains or load a Snapshot and each time it froze when trying to remove a chain, needing a power cycle restart. So I removed all peripherals except the audio interface and it worked fine. Haven’t got time to try and diagnose which peripheral might be causing it (if there is one) but wanted to point it out in case anyone has an idea.
Are all these periphericals (USB-MIDi I suppose) powered by the Pi ?
Yes they are. They don’t have any separate power source.
This may cause the problem. I"m quiet sure there’s à huge power consumption peak when all these gears starts simultaneously .
If ever they can be externaly powered it’s a good idea To use this feature. Even after startup a Pi5 at full CPU load is power hungry and even more if you use a NVME SSD.
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I found it useful to use a USB hub with buttons to turn individual ports on and off. I have the USB audio card permanently connected to Zynthian, and the rest is connected via the USB hub. I use these:
U3CHARGEHUB10 | i-tec USB 3.0 Charging HUB 10 port + Power Adapter 48 W | i-tec and U3CHARGEHUB4 | i-tec USB 3.0 Metal HUB 4 Port with individual On/Off Switches | i-tec
EDIT:
I usually use the small one without external power, and thanks to the buttons, I can turn on what I need step by step.
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Hub with switches is a good idea, will take a look. Thanks.