I’m trying to use my Pi 0 W as a kiosk behind my monitor as a MagicMirror. Not hosting the mirror, but just loading the website hosted on my homelab.
Initially I was getting a kernel panic when running sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade, on the upgrade of the linux_kernel package. I managed to fix this by changing /boot/cmdline.txt to include ipv6.disable=1.
Now, it seems to freeze (I presume the same problem) as soon as it boots up and loads the MagicMirror web page. It works up until the page is fully loaded. At this point, I can’t SSH into it. I’m using mitori on RPi Lite with X/matchbox, because Chromium on RPi Desktop was laggy.
I’m using a 2.5A RPi3 power supply and only have the HDMI plugged in.
Does anyone know what might be the issue? Or is it likely a broken board?
I’m unsure if it’s related, but chromium and any website loaded with mitori on RPi Desktop was extremely slow. Is this the performance of the Pi 0 W or a symptom of another issue?
Hey,
Welcome to the Forum!
The Pi 0 W has limited processing power and memory compared to other Raspberry Pi models, so running a resource-intensive application like Chromium along with MagicMirror could potentially cause performance issues or freezes.
You may want to check the system resources usage using a tool like htop to see if any processes are consuming too much CPU or memory. Additionally, you could try disabling unnecessary services or processes to free up resources, or consider using a lighter weight browser or webview solution.
Otherwise, it is possible that there could be a fault somewhere on the board itself, if nothing else works, send Core Electronics through an email to get the warranty process started.
Cheers,
Blayden
Hi!
That makes sense. The Pi isn’t running MagicMirror, so that’s hopefully shed some load. It’s solely loading Mitori (Less intensive than Chromium I believe) and then the MagicMirror webpage.
I’ll have a look through the resources and try find if I need to disable some services.
Looking at performance, it sits at 4% CPU and 12% RAM at idle. When Mitori is showing MagicMirror (Hosted on another machine), it goes up to 80% CPU and 50% RAM, but still crashes/freezes after a minute or so.
It’s running Raspbian CLI, so there’s not really any other services other than Xorg, matchbox, and mitori running. I’ve seen others run it fine, any thoughts why it might be problematic?
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Hey,
I would say that the Pi Zero W itself is likely just not powerful enough to run everything at once, it is a very limited board in relation to RAM and processing power.
Another possible cause could be software conflicts. It’s possible that there is a compatibility issue between Mitori and MagicMirror that is causing the system to crash. You could try running Mitori with a different application or testing MagicMirror on a different device to see if the issue persists.
It’s also worth checking the logs to see if there are any error messages or other indications of what might be causing the crashes. This can help narrow down the cause of the issue and provide more information for troubleshooting.
Let me know if you find anything after those steps and maybe we can narrow down if there is a significant problem that can be fixed up.
Cheers,
Blayden
It’s possible that the issue you’re experiencing is related to the kernel panic you encountered earlier. Since you’re running the Pi 0 W as a kiosk, it’s possible that it’s running out of memory or encountering some other kind of resource issue when loading and displaying the MagicMirror web page.
You can use the “dmesg” and “journalctl” commands to view the system logs and look for any error messages or other indications of what might be going wrong.
