weekend: mythtv ; solar charging
Sun Jul 13 14:04:36 EDT 2014
The 2 main projects for this weekend have been (1) getting the MythTV DVR working with over-the-air broadcasts and (2) setting up the new charge controller between the solar panel and the battery for camping at Pennsic.
Our MythTV has not had any software updates since it was installed in May 2010. Someone commented on a site somewhere that updates can fix things, and they can break things; and if you don't need anything fixed, then maybe you're better off without them. (Those of you running Linux know there are updates and patches every couple of weeks.) Something hard-coded in the process of setting up over-the-air channels was trying to load a no-longer-existing web page (http://directstage.directvla.com/opgnet/cssbit.aspx, part of DIRECTV® Latin America - what's that got to do with my local broadcasts?), and failing. This was probably long gone from the current software, so I needed something fixed, and it was time to update. (Also, if you're asking for help on the Internet, nobody wants to spend time diagnosing problems that may have been already fixed in software updates. You will incur wrath and/or mocking.)
I updated Ubuntu Linux from 9.10 to 10.4, and then again to 12.4, a long-term support (LTS) level. All the Linux applications were updated in the process. There were still some strange behaviors, which I eventually narrowed down to 2 problems. (1) The MythTV Frontend process does not display anything; and (2) DNS (Domain Name Service) was not working, which prevents contacting anything over the web. The dead DNS was kept the server from contacting SchedulesDirect, which it needed to do to get a list of my OTA channels. 12.4 introduces dnsmasq (a lightweight DHCP and caching DNS server). This seems to be working fine on my laptop, but not on the Myth server. The simplest fix appeared to be popping some DNS resolvers into the /etc/resolv.conf file (in contradiction to its directions not to edit the file by hand). I had the IP addresses for the Comcast DNS servers (cdns01.comcast.net and cdns02.comcast.net) and popped those into the file. DNS works. nslookup works. MythTV gets data from SchedulesDirect. Channel lineups. Program schedules.
The MythTV is recording programs again. But the front end is still not functional. You can't watch programs on the TV. The web server works, so you could stream or download a program to your laptop. (If it's HD, it will be better on your laptop. But you lose the commercial skipping; irrelevant for PBS.)
GRUB (the GRand Universal Boot loader) has been broken since our server's early days. I was trying to improve something, and I broke it, and I could not figure out how to undo or fix. The server could boot, but it would not auto-boot - it sat at the boot screen, waiting for someone to select a kernel (or simply hit ENTER). This meant the server could not resume after a power outage. (An afternoon storm might mean not recording evening shows. A power hit during a vacation might miss days of recordings.) The first update (to 10.4) fixed grub.
With 12.4 there was a new problem of the left side of windows going outside the displayable portion of the screen. There are adjustments for this in the front-end setup, which was unaccessible without the front end. But at some point in my poking around yesterday something fixed that.
The charge controller has just been the process of getting acquainted. It works. It gives me numbers. It was designed for a much bigger set-up.
It reported 12.8 volts on the battery when I hooked it up yesterday. It was showing 13.6v the last time I checked it today, and the battery bar graph has gone from 4 bars to 5 (max). Charging shuts off at 14.5v, so it will keep going. (A 12v lead-acid battery is a collection of 6 cells, which each produce 2.1v.)
0.9 amps is still the highest charging current I've seen. I left the solar panel on the carport roof overnight, facing west and angled 30° from horizontal. The west-facing roof is in shadow in the morning, but gets sun most of the day, and is not blocked by tree shade until fairly late in the afternoon. And tree shade affected the output far less than clouds. (It also faces away from the street.) In this position it was producing 0.6A with mid-day sun, which went to 0.9A when I moved the panel to face south at about 15°. But even with what should be optimum positioning, I'm still tending to see 0.7-0.8A.
It will interesting to see how much current the various loads draw, and to track the battery status through Pennsic. Is my usage - charging a laptop, a tablet, (a cell phone in past years,) and miscellaneous batteries for lights and camera, and running an air pump - matched by the solar charging, or am I drawing the battery down? Would the battery make it through 2 weeks without solar charging on site? (I.e. do I need this complication?)
Monday 01:23
I have the MythTV Frontend working again. Apparently there was an invalid no-longer valid "theme" selected someplace. Of course, you have to run the front end to get to the set-up screen to pick the themes. MythMusic is somehow involved in this. I un-installed MythMusic, and the frontend displayed. Then I could go through the front-end set-up. There are new options since 9.10. There's a set-up wizard that does some interaction over the 'net. It failed because a reboot replaced the /etc/resolv.conf file I had modified to get DNS working. It looks like that's going to be a persistent problem, breaking the program schedule updates.
12.04 also started a screen blanker running on the console. One suggestion was to de-install them (there's 2 provided by default). Now the screen just shuts off if there's no activity. There should always be output there while the computer's on. Gotta be a setting for it somewhere....
The other new problem is the remote control. MythTV is ignoring it. But the "irw" utility shows that the signals are being received by the computer. I may have made some progress on that, but there's a recording in progress and I don't want to reboot. ([01:30] Make that 2 recordings in progres....)
As much as I love my DVR (listing upcoming recordings, listing recording conflicts, skipping commercials, access to recordings, as much storage as I choose to add (2TB so far)), I have to admit that this is not for the average person. It works fine for months or years, but occasionally I have problems that take days to resolve and leave the unit crippled. I didn't have days to devote to this in the middle of the week, so I got no recordings Wednesday-Saturday. Some of these things shouldn't even need fixing in a version of Linux that's configured to be a DVR first, and a general-purpose computer second.
Monday 13:00
I changed the solar charging shut-off voltage from 14.5v to 14.3v. Wikipedia said that the gassing threshold is 2.4v/cell or 14.4v. At that point you begin to lose some of the battery's electrolyte, permanently reducing the battery's storage capacity.
Monday 13:26
I rebooted the MythTV almost 90 minutes ago, and the screen has not shut off. But that's a separate issue from the screensavers, and I wonder whether their removal is connected with the backend not starting up after the last 2 reboots. The webpage that fixed the screen shutoff was also working on the screensavers, so I'm going to re-install them and try to turn them off, and see whether the backend starts again. (The DNS still gets broken in /etc/resolv.conf with every boot.)
Wednesday 12:54
I've tried restoring and removing the screen savers. I was not able to prevent the screen savers from running when they were installed, so they're gone again.
I restored MythMusic, since the Theme should be valid now, but that broke the frontend again, so MythMusic is gone again.
I added a boot script to start the backend, but the backend is still not starting at boot; the problem is elsewhere.
The remote is still not working.
Another possible gain from the updates: there is now an ATI Proprietary Driver (that I don't think was available 4 years ago) that may let me get HDMI output from the DVR. When we playback HD recordings now, the processor has to work hard to rescale the output to fit a smaller window (SVGA?), and it doesn't fill the TV screen. The system doesn't have the power to do this while it's recording other shows. It's been less of a problem before because Comcast provided SD versions of most of the HD channels, but over the air we will have only HD for most of the major networks. (PBS has both HD and SD most of the time.) SD was also about 1/6 the disk space of HD. A win/win. I'll have to open the box to put the video card back in, and then download and install the drivers, and hope it works.
Apparently I have a DVI to HDMI cable around here somewhere. I must have had one 4 years ago, to connect the video card to the TV and conclude that the card wasn't working.
Wednesday 14:14
They just replaced our electric meter, which caused a brief power outage. The MythTV server did not boot. The BIOS is set to boot after a power outage.
All the clocks need to be reset. (I just did this a couple of days ago, thunderstorms.)
Thursday 13:25
The charge controller was not showing any productive activity yesterday. Tuesday was clouds and rain and storms, so I wasn't concerned about the numbers then. But yesterday was sunny. The panel was in a location that showed good results over the weekend, and the controller said it was getting zilch. The reported battery voltage was gradually dropping too. (There is an LED on one of the switches, and that would be a drain, but it should be tiny compared to this battery.) Sunny again today. I would perhaps have to use the old, dumb controller if this one wasn't working. I disconnected the battery for a moment. The controller "rebooted", and then showed the battery voltage significantly higher, and good charging activity - as there should be in full sunlight. I guess this thing can have glitches like any other computer. It probably did charge yesterday, but it probably didn't count anything toward the cumulative charging. If that number has changed when I get home, I'll have a better idea about that. The cumulative values don't reset when the battery connects; I suspected they might. (They can be reset manually.)
Friday 15:26
I found a DVI to VGA adapter. That must be how I was trying out the video card 4 years ago.
Friday 17:47
The solar charge controller reports 2 amp-hours of charging today. It showed 2 for Sat-Thurs. Either today is way out of line, or the previous 5 days were under-reported. If I run my loads through the controller (instead of directly off the battery, which I tended to do with the old controller) I'll have some idea whether typical daily use exceeds the charging.
Friday 18:42
I removed the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 MCE dual NTSC tuner card from the MythTV and re-installed the ATI Radeon X600SE 128mb PCI Express Video Card. After a couple of reboots I'm getting a display from the ATI Radeon video card. It seems to have taken priority over the standard video. (Rather, Linux has given it priority.) The video still doesn't use the entire TV screen, but that may be because I'm using a DVI -> VGA adapter and the TV's VGA input. I'm hoping that using an HDMI adapter will get me full resolution, and I'll be able to watch HD recordings on the whole screen.
woot! had some reconditioned 4TB disks on sale earlier this week. I'm seriously thinking about upgrading the MythTV from 2.2TB to 8TB. I've been wanting to expand for a while, but didn't want the disruption. I've got disruption anyway now, so this might be the time. (Plus I no longer have SD channels for some of the things we record, so some shows will take up more space.) I need to learn more about transcoding (converting recordings to lower resolution - no need to copy 1920x1080 videos to a 1280x800 tablet). I think MythTV's handling of that has been improved.
Sunday 11:40
According to an old woot! page, the DVI-to-VGA adapter came with the Radeon video card. That suggests that the card might only do VGA resolution, not HDMI. I won't know until I try an HDMI adapter. An Overstock page says "Max resolution: 1920 x 1440/75Hz"; HD is 1920 x 1080, so there's still hope.
Mr SpareParts says "Max Resolution: 1920 x 1200". Maybe there were multiple versions of the card. Odd that I'm not finding the manufacturer's page....
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/679451.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]
The 2 main projects for this weekend have been (1) getting the MythTV DVR working with over-the-air broadcasts and (2) setting up the new charge controller between the solar panel and the battery for camping at Pennsic.
Our MythTV has not had any software updates since it was installed in May 2010. Someone commented on a site somewhere that updates can fix things, and they can break things; and if you don't need anything fixed, then maybe you're better off without them. (Those of you running Linux know there are updates and patches every couple of weeks.) Something hard-coded in the process of setting up over-the-air channels was trying to load a no-longer-existing web page (http://directstage.directvla.com/opgnet/cssbit.aspx, part of DIRECTV® Latin America - what's that got to do with my local broadcasts?), and failing. This was probably long gone from the current software, so I needed something fixed, and it was time to update. (Also, if you're asking for help on the Internet, nobody wants to spend time diagnosing problems that may have been already fixed in software updates. You will incur wrath and/or mocking.)
I updated Ubuntu Linux from 9.10 to 10.4, and then again to 12.4, a long-term support (LTS) level. All the Linux applications were updated in the process. There were still some strange behaviors, which I eventually narrowed down to 2 problems. (1) The MythTV Frontend process does not display anything; and (2) DNS (Domain Name Service) was not working, which prevents contacting anything over the web. The dead DNS was kept the server from contacting SchedulesDirect, which it needed to do to get a list of my OTA channels. 12.4 introduces dnsmasq (a lightweight DHCP and caching DNS server). This seems to be working fine on my laptop, but not on the Myth server. The simplest fix appeared to be popping some DNS resolvers into the /etc/resolv.conf file (in contradiction to its directions not to edit the file by hand). I had the IP addresses for the Comcast DNS servers (cdns01.comcast.net and cdns02.comcast.net) and popped those into the file. DNS works. nslookup works. MythTV gets data from SchedulesDirect. Channel lineups. Program schedules.
The MythTV is recording programs again. But the front end is still not functional. You can't watch programs on the TV. The web server works, so you could stream or download a program to your laptop. (If it's HD, it will be better on your laptop. But you lose the commercial skipping; irrelevant for PBS.)
GRUB (the GRand Universal Boot loader) has been broken since our server's early days. I was trying to improve something, and I broke it, and I could not figure out how to undo or fix. The server could boot, but it would not auto-boot - it sat at the boot screen, waiting for someone to select a kernel (or simply hit ENTER). This meant the server could not resume after a power outage. (An afternoon storm might mean not recording evening shows. A power hit during a vacation might miss days of recordings.) The first update (to 10.4) fixed grub.
With 12.4 there was a new problem of the left side of windows going outside the displayable portion of the screen. There are adjustments for this in the front-end setup, which was unaccessible without the front end. But at some point in my poking around yesterday something fixed that.
The charge controller has just been the process of getting acquainted. It works. It gives me numbers. It was designed for a much bigger set-up.
It reported 12.8 volts on the battery when I hooked it up yesterday. It was showing 13.6v the last time I checked it today, and the battery bar graph has gone from 4 bars to 5 (max). Charging shuts off at 14.5v, so it will keep going. (A 12v lead-acid battery is a collection of 6 cells, which each produce 2.1v.)
0.9 amps is still the highest charging current I've seen. I left the solar panel on the carport roof overnight, facing west and angled 30° from horizontal. The west-facing roof is in shadow in the morning, but gets sun most of the day, and is not blocked by tree shade until fairly late in the afternoon. And tree shade affected the output far less than clouds. (It also faces away from the street.) In this position it was producing 0.6A with mid-day sun, which went to 0.9A when I moved the panel to face south at about 15°. But even with what should be optimum positioning, I'm still tending to see 0.7-0.8A.
It will interesting to see how much current the various loads draw, and to track the battery status through Pennsic. Is my usage - charging a laptop, a tablet, (a cell phone in past years,) and miscellaneous batteries for lights and camera, and running an air pump - matched by the solar charging, or am I drawing the battery down? Would the battery make it through 2 weeks without solar charging on site? (I.e. do I need this complication?)
Monday 01:23
I have the MythTV Frontend working again. Apparently there was an invalid no-longer valid "theme" selected someplace. Of course, you have to run the front end to get to the set-up screen to pick the themes. MythMusic is somehow involved in this. I un-installed MythMusic, and the frontend displayed. Then I could go through the front-end set-up. There are new options since 9.10. There's a set-up wizard that does some interaction over the 'net. It failed because a reboot replaced the /etc/resolv.conf file I had modified to get DNS working. It looks like that's going to be a persistent problem, breaking the program schedule updates.
12.04 also started a screen blanker running on the console. One suggestion was to de-install them (there's 2 provided by default). Now the screen just shuts off if there's no activity. There should always be output there while the computer's on. Gotta be a setting for it somewhere....
The other new problem is the remote control. MythTV is ignoring it. But the "irw" utility shows that the signals are being received by the computer. I may have made some progress on that, but there's a recording in progress and I don't want to reboot. ([01:30] Make that 2 recordings in progres....)
As much as I love my DVR (listing upcoming recordings, listing recording conflicts, skipping commercials, access to recordings, as much storage as I choose to add (2TB so far)), I have to admit that this is not for the average person. It works fine for months or years, but occasionally I have problems that take days to resolve and leave the unit crippled. I didn't have days to devote to this in the middle of the week, so I got no recordings Wednesday-Saturday. Some of these things shouldn't even need fixing in a version of Linux that's configured to be a DVR first, and a general-purpose computer second.
Monday 13:00
I changed the solar charging shut-off voltage from 14.5v to 14.3v. Wikipedia said that the gassing threshold is 2.4v/cell or 14.4v. At that point you begin to lose some of the battery's electrolyte, permanently reducing the battery's storage capacity.
Monday 13:26
I rebooted the MythTV almost 90 minutes ago, and the screen has not shut off. But that's a separate issue from the screensavers, and I wonder whether their removal is connected with the backend not starting up after the last 2 reboots. The webpage that fixed the screen shutoff was also working on the screensavers, so I'm going to re-install them and try to turn them off, and see whether the backend starts again. (The DNS still gets broken in /etc/resolv.conf with every boot.)
Wednesday 12:54
I've tried restoring and removing the screen savers. I was not able to prevent the screen savers from running when they were installed, so they're gone again.
I restored MythMusic, since the Theme should be valid now, but that broke the frontend again, so MythMusic is gone again.
I added a boot script to start the backend, but the backend is still not starting at boot; the problem is elsewhere.
The remote is still not working.
Another possible gain from the updates: there is now an ATI Proprietary Driver (that I don't think was available 4 years ago) that may let me get HDMI output from the DVR. When we playback HD recordings now, the processor has to work hard to rescale the output to fit a smaller window (SVGA?), and it doesn't fill the TV screen. The system doesn't have the power to do this while it's recording other shows. It's been less of a problem before because Comcast provided SD versions of most of the HD channels, but over the air we will have only HD for most of the major networks. (PBS has both HD and SD most of the time.) SD was also about 1/6 the disk space of HD. A win/win. I'll have to open the box to put the video card back in, and then download and install the drivers, and hope it works.
Apparently I have a DVI to HDMI cable around here somewhere. I must have had one 4 years ago, to connect the video card to the TV and conclude that the card wasn't working.
Wednesday 14:14
They just replaced our electric meter, which caused a brief power outage. The MythTV server did not boot. The BIOS is set to boot after a power outage.
All the clocks need to be reset. (I just did this a couple of days ago, thunderstorms.)
Thursday 13:25
The charge controller was not showing any productive activity yesterday. Tuesday was clouds and rain and storms, so I wasn't concerned about the numbers then. But yesterday was sunny. The panel was in a location that showed good results over the weekend, and the controller said it was getting zilch. The reported battery voltage was gradually dropping too. (There is an LED on one of the switches, and that would be a drain, but it should be tiny compared to this battery.) Sunny again today. I would perhaps have to use the old, dumb controller if this one wasn't working. I disconnected the battery for a moment. The controller "rebooted", and then showed the battery voltage significantly higher, and good charging activity - as there should be in full sunlight. I guess this thing can have glitches like any other computer. It probably did charge yesterday, but it probably didn't count anything toward the cumulative charging. If that number has changed when I get home, I'll have a better idea about that. The cumulative values don't reset when the battery connects; I suspected they might. (They can be reset manually.)
Friday 15:26
I found a DVI to VGA adapter. That must be how I was trying out the video card 4 years ago.
Friday 17:47
The solar charge controller reports 2 amp-hours of charging today. It showed 2 for Sat-Thurs. Either today is way out of line, or the previous 5 days were under-reported. If I run my loads through the controller (instead of directly off the battery, which I tended to do with the old controller) I'll have some idea whether typical daily use exceeds the charging.
Friday 18:42
I removed the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 MCE dual NTSC tuner card from the MythTV and re-installed the ATI Radeon X600SE 128mb PCI Express Video Card. After a couple of reboots I'm getting a display from the ATI Radeon video card. It seems to have taken priority over the standard video. (Rather, Linux has given it priority.) The video still doesn't use the entire TV screen, but that may be because I'm using a DVI -> VGA adapter and the TV's VGA input. I'm hoping that using an HDMI adapter will get me full resolution, and I'll be able to watch HD recordings on the whole screen.
woot! had some reconditioned 4TB disks on sale earlier this week. I'm seriously thinking about upgrading the MythTV from 2.2TB to 8TB. I've been wanting to expand for a while, but didn't want the disruption. I've got disruption anyway now, so this might be the time. (Plus I no longer have SD channels for some of the things we record, so some shows will take up more space.) I need to learn more about transcoding (converting recordings to lower resolution - no need to copy 1920x1080 videos to a 1280x800 tablet). I think MythTV's handling of that has been improved.
Sunday 11:40
According to an old woot! page, the DVI-to-VGA adapter came with the Radeon video card. That suggests that the card might only do VGA resolution, not HDMI. I won't know until I try an HDMI adapter. An Overstock page says "Max resolution: 1920 x 1440/75Hz"; HD is 1920 x 1080, so there's still hope.
Mr SpareParts says "Max Resolution: 1920 x 1200". Maybe there were multiple versions of the card. Odd that I'm not finding the manufacturer's page....
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/679451.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]