TIPI Usage and Support

[+jedimatt42]

https://github.com/jedimatt42/tipi/wiki/TIPI-to-PI-Wiring

 

If that doesn't help, you may have to get shell access to the PI and find out what's happening.. headless access instructions https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/configuration.html#setting-up-a-headless-raspberry-pi

 

 

[+arcadeshopper]

5 minutes ago, jedimatt42 said:

No. It should be fairly immediate. 

 

I would double check orientation of cabling/connection with the PI and TIPI .

 

 

agreed, if call tipi doesn't immediately flash the led and load the config it's a wiring issue OR the pi isn't running the image. 

 

Doublecheck the wiring diagram: https://github.com/jedimatt42/tipi/wiki/TIPI-to-PI-Wiring

If that's correct then doublecheck the PI is loading correctly 

 

Greg

[Eagle4Christ]

29 minutes ago, arcadeshopper said:

agreed, if call tipi doesn't immediately flash the led and load the config it's a wiring issue OR the pi isn't running the image. 

 

Doublecheck the wiring diagram: https://github.com/jedimatt42/tipi/wiki/TIPI-to-PI-Wiring

If that's correct then doublecheck the PI is loading correctly 

 

Greg

Much obliged to you both!

[Eagle4Christ]

2 hours ago, jedimatt42 said:

https://github.com/jedimatt42/tipi/wiki/TIPI-to-PI-Wiring

 

If that doesn't help, you may have to get shell access to the PI and find out what's happening.. headless access instructions https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/configuration.html#setting-up-a-headless-raspberry-pi

 

 

 

2 hours ago, arcadeshopper said:

agreed, if call tipi doesn't immediately flash the led and load the config it's a wiring issue OR the pi isn't running the image. 

 

Doublecheck the wiring diagram: https://github.com/jedimatt42/tipi/wiki/TIPI-to-PI-Wiring

If that's correct then doublecheck the PI is loading correctly 

 

Greg

 

Update: a connection problem. After some light pressure to make sure the pins were in touch, all is well.

 

Thanks again!

 

[+dhe]

I have two tipi's in the house, and it was becoming a pita to keep the ip's straight. So I put both on a dhcp reservation. Changed the hostnames to titipi and gtipi (TI tipi, Geneve tipi) and labeled the slot on the outside of the pbox with the ip address... Ah.. Much better. ?

[Fonzie]

Help wanted! Printing Problem.

After more than a year of using tipi and printing out PDF’s, I pooched the sd card (maybe I didn’t but I thought I had) so I downloaded the latest 2.28 Buster image GUIFORMATTED a 64gb card to Fat32 and burned it to the card and installed it into the PI of my sidecar TIPI. I went through the installation process and all seemed ok. I can access several writer programs (FW, BA Writer, TI-writer) save and re-load the files but every Print File: PI.PIO has resulted in a blank page in the resulting PDFs.

I’m at a loss. Where’d the print go? It used to be like clockwork. I cleaned the cart port and FG99 contacts. Re-booted and tried different programs with the same result. Totally blank PDF’s.

Any suggestions???

[+jedimatt42]

I'll have to do some testing of PI.PIO and see if I broke something... (unless someone else knows what's up) 

 

As for the common practice of formatting an SD card ( which just creates a filesystem on it ) before then writing an image is a waste of electricity. The image overwrites whatever filesystem previously created when manually formatted. 

 

--

 

Hmm... A quick trip to TI BASIC, 10 PRINT "HELLO", LIST "PI.PIO", yields a good PDF.

 

I will dig deeper after work.

[+9640News]

I printed with PI.PIO on the Geneve just this week and it was with TIPICFG not saying anything about new updates.  This is on a PI 4b.  I haven't made an image in at least a year on that system.

 

[Fonzie]

Went to Basic, typed in just like you: 10 PRINT "HELLO", LIST "PI.PIO" and produced another PDF in TIPI. Opened PDF and no joy. It was totally blank like all my other PDFs.

 

It must have something to do with my 64gb card and formatting it to fat32. I had read on the internet that the pi could accept a card larger than 32gb only if formatted to Fat32. Unfortunately, I burned all 3 of the only sd cards I had (all 64gbs) with the image for backups.

 

I may try to reformat to xfat if possible and try again. An 8gb card that I ordered is a week or so away.

[+9640News]

27 minutes ago, Fonzie said:

Went to Basic, typed in just like you: 10 PRINT "HELLO", LIST "PI.PIO" and produced another PDF in TIPI. Opened PDF and no joy. It was totally blank like all my other PDFs.

 

It must have something to do with my 64gb card and formatting it to fat32. I had read on the internet that the pi could accept a card larger than 32gb only if formatted to Fat32. Unfortunately, I burned all 3 of the only sd cards I had (all 64gbs) with the image for backups.

 

I may try to reformat to xfat if possible and try again. An 8gb card that I ordered is a week or so away.

I followed the wiki at tipipeb installation · jedimatt42/tipi Wiki (github.com) when I last did anything, and that was with a 128 gb card.  That was over a year ago, and everything worked back then.  As I think he said, he had a new image, so don't know if something could have changed in the iterim.

[Fonzie]

Now that I think of it, the card I retrieved from the tipi (thinking it was pooched) was a 64gb and I had not reformatted to fat32 first. It ran perfectly with the old image. I was unaware that my pi 3b card was not supposed to exceed a 32gb limit. Now, however, I've got 3 64gb cards with buster 2.28 on re-formatted fat32 cards. I am in the process of attempting to use SD Card Formatter to completely overwrite a card to retry installation. It doesn't tell me what format it is using. I'm hopeful it is exfat. This still doesn't answer the question about Buster 2.28 and a 64gb sd card.

[+mizapf]

Didn't I read something about the boot partition needing a FAT32 format? The rest may be formatted as desired (ext4, xfs, ...).

[+arcadeshopper]

As Matt states the imaging process erases everything on the card and sets it up with the correct partitions with the right format. Doing anything before imaging is a waste of time.

If your card isn't working with the latest image get another card and image it.. use etcher to image the card if you are using something else that may be the issue

Not following the instructions and advice of the designer is not a supported method and will waste everyone's time.





Sent from my Pixel 6 Pro using Tapatalk

[+dhe]

Matt, I have a suspicion, but no evidence, that I had a condition where the bus was held low and wouldn't allow the Geneve to come up - screaming noise generators. I would like to request, if possible, the next gen of cards include a hide switch like the Horizons.

 

[+jedimatt42]

1 hour ago, dhe said:

Matt, I have a suspicion, but no evidence, that I had a condition where the bus was held low and wouldn't allow the Geneve to come up - screaming noise generators. I would like to request, if possible, the next gen of cards include a hide switch like the Horizons.

 

 

 

 

This sort of workaround just promotes pointing fingers instead of getting to the bottom of the issue. The reason a Horizon RAM DISK might have an off switch, is because the DSR powerup routine can be corrupted since it lives in RAM. The TIPI's DSR is in an EPROM, which does not suffer from battery loss corruption. 

 

There are issues with the TIPI when it isn't running as the first card in the CRU DSR chain (>1000 or >1100), if you reset (without power off) while the TIPI is stuck on... (TIPI led on) - this is a known problem, as I only have a soft ( machine code controlled reset ) and failed to consume the reset signal from the bus.  The TIPI needs to be the first device that executes a powerup routine from a DSR ROM, if it is 'stuck' on. This could cause the symptom you describe. If you are on a Geneve, you have to power cycle sometimes. 

 

How did you resolve it? Power off? If so, that's your solution. 

 

I got rid of my Geneve, so I will not produce solutions for a Geneve without a pretty high level of evidence that it will solve a real problem.

 

 

[Sinphaltimus]

4 hours ago, 9640News said:

I followed the wiki at tipipeb installation · jedimatt42/tipi Wiki (github.com) when I last did anything, and that was with a 128 gb card.  That was over a year ago, and everything worked back then.  As I think he said, he had a new image, so don't know if something could have changed in the iterim.

My experience with re-using SD-cards has yielded a common practice for me. This is not specific to TIPI but I have ran into weird issues re-using imaged SD cards. 

What I've found to eliminate these kinds of issues? 

in Windows I run DISKPART from an administrative command prompt and do a clean function on the SD card. After that I image and the weirdness is gone. Thi is true for Amiga images, TiPi images and pi Images in general (I have 3 Pi 3b+ and one Pi 400. All of my "anomolies" went away as soon as I put diskpart cleaning into my process.

I hope it helps you. No harm in the practice.

[+dhe]

>This sort of workaround just promotes pointing fingers instead of getting to the bottom of the issue.

I disagree. The normal procedure for trouble shooting would be to pull cards until things start working. I wish ALL cards had the ability to be 'hidden'.

 

Every time you insert or extract a card you run the risk of damaging hardware. Having a soft way to eliminate a card from the equation would let you know immediately if that card is suspect.

 

In this case, I just unplugged everything and let it sit for an hour. Then I powered up the PI waited five minutes, verified it's functionality with ssh and going over the logs, then powered up the Geneve. The failure case was interesting, in that everything was working, I was in the middle of typing a command at the CLI and the system locked up.

 

Then power down, waited five minutes powered up and nothing but the sound scream which usually indicates the bus is held and the boot up instruction that silences the sound chip is not gotten to.

 

That's when I decided to let everything sit for an hour with no power.

 

[+dhe]

>This sort of workaround just promotes pointing fingers instead of getting to the bottom of the issue.

 

If your ever inclined to build a hypervisor card, that would be a combination of bus analyzer and hypervisor that would store the last 10K instructions and record the state of the bus on each cycle,  I'd happily buy two. ?  Maybe add in remote reboot, remote interrupt injector to slow down the machine, maybe a password on power up, your excellent ram tester, ...

[+9640News]

8 minutes ago, dhe said:

 

In this case, I just unplugged everything and let it sit for an hour. Then I powered up the PI waited five minutes, verified it's functionality with ssh and going over the logs, then powered up the Geneve. The failure case was interesting, in that everything was working, I was in the middle of typing a command at the CLI and the system locked up.

 

I'm not aware of anything on the Geneve side where the process of typing a command at the CLI would cause the issue you describe.  If this is something you can reproduce, let @insanemultitaske and myself know how to reproduce.  It actually sounds like you may have had some other hardware issue involved.

Beery

 

[+jedimatt42]

7 hours ago, Fonzie said:

Went to Basic, typed in just like you: 10 PRINT "HELLO", LIST "PI.PIO" and produced another PDF in TIPI. Opened PDF and no joy. It was totally blank like all my other PDFs.

 

It must have something to do with my 64gb card and formatting it to fat32. I had read on the internet that the pi could accept a card larger than 32gb only if formatted to Fat32. Unfortunately, I burned all 3 of the only sd cards I had (all 64gbs) with the image for backups.

 

I may try to reformat to xfat if possible and try again. An 8gb card that I ordered is a week or so away.

 

use the tipi web interface to view the logs just after attempting to print... http://tipi.local:9900/logs

 

You should see something like:

 

2022-01-12 17:26:56,180 PioFile     : INFO     creating new spool: /tmp/print_2022_01_12_T17_26_56.prn
2022-01-12 17:26:56,237 PioFile     : INFO     write special? PI.PIO
2022-01-12 17:26:56,564 PioFile     : INFO     write special? PI.PIO
2022-01-12 17:26:56,611 PioFile     : INFO     close special? PI.PIO
...

 

If there is an error in the PDF conversion, I'd expect it to appear in the log after the 'close special? PI.PIO' 

 

Also, there is more detail in /var/log/tipi/pio.log ( but you have to ssh into the PI to get to that )... It should look like:

 

Converting spool /tmp/print_2022_01_12_T08_42_38.prn to PDF pages

delays around ack: t1=0    t2=0    t3=0    t4=0    t5=0


I am at page 1
command = cp  ./Test1.prn  /home/tipi/pdfs/eps/
Merging pages into single PDF:
/home/tipi/pdfs/pdf/page1.pdf
Job Complete!

 

If you can look in these places, you might be able to find evidence of a failure. A tangible string to pull on.

 

[+arcadeshopper]

Matt, I have a suspicion, but no evidence, that I had a condition where the bus was held low and wouldn't allow the Geneve to come up - screaming noise generators. I would like to request, if possible, the next gen of cards include a hide switch like the Horizons.
 

I have never had this happen with a tipi. It was likely something else in your system.

Sent from my Pixel 6 Pro using Tapatalk

[Fonzie]

SD CARD FORMATTER successfully completed the re-format back to exfat: File system: exFat 59.45 GB. For the record, I have always used Etcher for image burning, all sd cards were SanDisk, and with sidecar instructions in hand I followed all instructions explicitly.

 

Now Etcher will not burn the Buster image to the re-formatted exFat card. And to complicate matters further, I have never been able to pull up the web-ui.  All I get is a...Hmmm...can't reach this page. I always just copied and dropped files from explorer. So, I am going to wait until my 8gb card gets here and use TIPI with the 64gb in the meantime knowing that PDF doesn't work for me. I'm done for a while.

 

"Not following the instructions and advice of the designer is not a supported method and will waste everyone's time." Trust me, it was not my intention to waste anyone's time and I'm sorry if this problem caused you any grief. I was just stating what I experienced and hoped there was a simple solution. My solution will be the smaller sd card.

[+arcadeshopper]

SD CARD FORMATTER successfully completed the re-format back to exfat: File system: exFat 59.45 GB. For the record, I have always used Etcher for image burning, all sd cards were SanDisk, and with sidecar instructions in hand I followed all instructions explicitly.
 
Now Etcher will not burn the Buster image to the re-formatted exFat card. And to complicate matters further, I have never been able to pull up the web-ui.  All I get is a...Hmmm...can't reach this page. I always just copied and dropped files from explorer. So, I am going to wait until my 8gb card gets here and use TIPI with the 64gb in the meantime knowing that PDF doesn't work for me. I'm done for a while.
 

"Not following the instructions and advice of the designer is not a supported method and will waste everyone's time." Trust me, it was not my intention to waste anyone's time and I'm sorry if this problem caused you any grief. I was just stating what I experienced and hoped there was a simple solution. My solution will be the smaller sd card.

Yeah if etcher won't write to it. There's something up with that card

Sent from my Pixel 6 Pro using Tapatalk

[dgrissom]

I've had image writers fail if SD cards have weird formats.   I usually use Windows Partition software to remove the partitions.  After that, sometimes they will image correctly. (Not always!)

As Greg kind of indicated, those cards format best when they are in the trash can...   

 

[Fonzie]

Success! I finally got TIPI back to running the way it used to for me. PDF’s are no longer blank; I can actually read them. Long story short: I used one of the 64gb sd’s that Etcher would not burn the image and tried Win32DiskImanager which did work. Then installed back in the pi, I reinstalled tipi.

All is good again. I can’t begin to remember all the re-formatting, programs and trials I used on the sd to get some program to accept it. When WIN32Imager said it had successfully burned, I was still skeptical, but (fingers crossed),I  installed it anyway.

Now, to try to remember what I did to resuscitate the other two 64gb sd’s. Thanks to all for your help and advice.