Brewblox assistence

Troubleshooting
1

I thought a general thread would be useful for these conversations rather than there being multiple.

First things first. I moved my BrewPi back to USB from WiFi as it had last connection this morning. I think it’s just the signal is poor where it is. But when I did and it was first booting, there was a momentary “kerchunk” out of the compressor on one of the fridges connected but it didn’t start. I think before I moved the USB cable, the cooler was in the waiting state. It feels like there may be somewhere in the initial boot code (while the progress bar is still on the screen of the brewpi) that the on-state slips through momentarily.

One thing from when I was initially setting up. At first, the list of boards in the DS2413 Actuator block was empty. When I cancelled creation and went back, the list was populated. I’m unsure if this is just down to my WiFi being temperamental to the brewpi.

I’ve also noticed that turning the beer setpoint off in the example setup you described in the Development Update thread also turns off the fridge setpoint. Is there no way to put this setup back in to fridge constant? I find fridge constant really useful when I’m crashing yeast starters and, more recently, working with petri dishes.

I’ll keep feeding any bugs/UX issues I find. Really am happy so far. :slight_smile:

2

More feedback. Setting things like presets & constraints on DS2413 actuators tent to unset the block & channel on the actuator.

3

Thanks for the feedback. We should merge the presets instead of overwriting all @Bob_Steers.

Regarding the offset actuator without a setpoint still influencing the target, that’s a bug I should look into.
As a workaround: each block has a groups setting and in the spark widget you can set which groups are active. If you remove the offset actuator from all active groups it will be suspended and will be inactive.

4

Can I check how long the data is supposed to be kept for for the graphs? I can’t seem to go back more than about 3h. Durations are set to 1d on the graph widgets.

5

Are you on the latest edge release? This was a bug we fixed last week.

6

I presume so. I installed on Wed evening using the instructions that take you through using the control utility available through pip.

7

Just tried updating using the brewblox-ctl. Still seem to have the same problem with the graph widgets & graphs on other widgets.

8

Just found the status command in brewblox-ctl I’m on release track edge and my config version is 0.2.1

9

In your graphs, if you enable the metric Combined Influx Points, what value does it have, and does it also only go back 3h?

10

Value is 1 and it (and other values) go back around 4h26m12s. I hadn’t actually checked the timestamps earlier.

11

It may be that your history service failed to configure correctly.

To check, could you please run the following command in your raspberry pi terminal, and post the resulting link?

curl -k -X POST --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --header 'Accept: application/json' -d '{ "query": "show continuous queries" }' 'https://localhost/history/_debug/query' | nc termbin 9999
12

Guessing that was supposed to be termbin.com. Here you go https://termbin.com/4yd6

13

Thanks. It indeed appears it failed to configure the history service.

You can do so by calling

curl -k -X POST --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --header 'Accept: application/json' 'https://localhost/history/query/configure'

Right now, when the UI requests data, it gets so much it starts discarding the oldest values to prevent memory bloat.

From tomorrow on, the history service will choose to return values averaged per 1m/10m/1h/6h, depending on the requested period.

14

Thanks. The debug output now looks like this https://termbin.com/k5sz

Some of my graphs seem to have started working from completely fresh data (data only available from about when I ran that command). Some are presenting data as before. The graphs working from fresh data will sometimes show more data if I change the duration to a lower value. Though its inconsistent which durations will return more data (10h did at first but won’t now. 5h does, though). I’m guessing this is just while the various downsample tables populate?

15

Yes, it should get more consistent when the downsampled data sets are populated. It decides which dataset to return every time you (re)load a graph, and then just keeps serving from that set.

16

More feedback (sorry!)

This worked but the offset actuator seemed to get into a weird state when adding it back into the group. It failed to add it back into the group and after some poking/refreshing seem to loose connection with the block on the spark and eventually would only show the header bar of the edit view (the bar with the widget/block name in it). I had to create a new offset actuator block but adding this in to the setup worked.

And the fix for the graphs worked. Thanks!

17

More feedback since I’ve been using brewblox for almost a week. Everything seems to be working really well but I keep coming up against the following:

  • I’d like graphs to have more than one scale. Putting actuator outputs, PWM values etc on the same graph as temperature results in temp being squashed down vertically making it hard to compare values and draw relationships between them
  • Zooming out on graphs doesn’t seem to re-load the data. I’m not sure if this was fixed in the changes you mentioned the other day. I haven’t updated as I have a beer on the go.
  • Fix the dashboard grid and scale the widgets. Arranging widgets is a slight pain at the moment as its slightly un-intuitive as to how moving a widget to a new location will affect all the others around it. But its even more confusing when opening the menu moves everything around. I think I’d prefer if either the menu opened over the dashboard or if the dashboard scaled to the width to the right of the menu so that all my widgets stayed in order.
  • On-Off switches are slightly un-obvious. It’s slightly hard to tell at first which is the current state. Making the current state blue, as with the “enabled” switches on actuators might be a reasonable solution for this.
  • Some pop-over menus can be closed by clicking off of them. Others can’t.
  • It’d be nice to be able to see widget graphs at the same time as their settings menus. When tuning PIDs, I think it’d be useful to be able to see the graph for the PID at the same time as the settings.
  • When I go to edit a value like a graph duration, I intuitively expect it to be selected such that if I just start typing it’ll be overwritten. I often just end up typing and ending up with values like “1h 2h”. Doing this oddly results in a value of “3h” being applied?!?!

Thanks for all the work. I really am pleased with how brewblox is coming along.

18

As a general note: our highest priority right now is making creation/configuration of widgets more user-friendly.

There’s a few points, so I’ll go through it in order. Where relevant, I’ve linked the related issue. Feel free to discuss specific features and feature requests there.

I’d like graphs to have more than one scale. Putting actuator outputs, PWM values etc on the same graph as temperature results in temp being squashed down vertically making it hard to compare values and draw relationships between them

We’ve had more requests for graphs with multiple Y axes. Our graphing library (Plotly) supports it, but user-friendly implementation is not so trivial it can be squeezed in between other issues. https://github.com/BrewBlox/brewblox-ui/issues/407

Zooming out on graphs doesn’t seem to re-load the data. I’m not sure if this was fixed in the changes you mentioned the other day. I haven’t updated as I have a beer on the go.

Direct manipulation of the displayed graph (zoom in/out, box selection, enable/disable lines) does not modify the data. We’ll get around to it, but it may take a while. https://github.com/BrewBlox/brewblox-ui/issues/408

Fix the dashboard grid and scale the widgets. Arranging widgets is a slight pain at the moment as its slightly un-intuitive as to how moving a widget to a new location will affect all the others around it. But its even more confusing when opening the menu moves everything around. I think I’d prefer if either the menu opened over the dashboard or if the dashboard scaled to the width to the right of the menu so that all my widgets stayed in order.

Fixing the dashboard width is on the backlog. I can take a quick peek at how much work it’d be to have the sidebar always cover the left-most widgets. https://github.com/BrewBlox/brewblox-ui/issues/364

Edit: Implemented a quick fix. The sidebar is now expanded when you load the page. If you keep it open, widgets will not move around when you reload the page. We’ll still be implementing a more permanent solution, but this is something I can do right away.

On-Off switches are slightly un-obvious. It’s slightly hard to tell at first which is the current state. Making the current state blue, as with the “enabled” switches on actuators might be a reasonable solution for this.

On/Off switch color is a quick change I can make after my current task.

Some pop-over menus can be closed by clicking off of them. Others can’t.

We made some modal (popover) windows not dismissable by clicking in the background, as it would have unintended consequences for popup edit fields in modal windows. Your wording suggests you’d rather have everything behave consistently. Is this true? https://github.com/BrewBlox/brewblox-ui/issues/409

It’d be nice to be able to see widget graphs at the same time as their settings menus. When tuning PIDs, I think it’d be useful to be able to see the graph for the PID at the same time as the settings.

We’d have to put on our thinking caps to figure out how to handle this in a way that is somewhat portable to mobile, but the idea makes sense. https://github.com/BrewBlox/brewblox-ui/issues/410

When I go to edit a value like a graph duration, I intuitively expect it to be selected such that if I just start typing it’ll be overwritten. I often just end up typing and ending up with values like “1h 2h”. Doing this oddly results in a value of “3h” being applied?!?!

If you intentionally enter a value of “1h 2h”, this will indeed be reinterpreted as “3h”. I’ll take a look at automatically selecting the entire value in input fields, to make replacing the value default behavior. https://github.com/BrewBlox/brewblox-ui/issues/411

19

Hi

Im using a relay board to run heater and fridge, should the suggested setup in the development thread still work or is there extra steps needed. can not get fridge to kick in.

Alternatively is there ‘easy to understand’ instructions on how to get my brewpi back to original.

Cheers

Paul

20

You have to add a DS2413 Actuator block for each relay controller. This breaks the DS2413-based relay controller into two actuators that can be turned on and off by the setup described in the development thread. I found the list of relay control boards in the DS2413 block was occasionally slow to populate, though.

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