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RPi Freezes And Becomes Unresponsive Due To PixyMon

Pixy Software
#1

Hi all,

I’ve installed PixyMon on a Raspberry Pi (RPi) 3 Model B+ utilizing the guide provided by PIXY; https://docs.pixycam.com/wiki/doku.php?id=wiki:v2:installing_pixymon_on_linux
I can initialize PixyMon and interact with it just like any user. However, in less than 20 minutes after I start the PixyMon application a communication error pops up. I can no longer communicate with the RPi through VNC Viewer, but I can ping to the RPi. I rebooted the RPi and started PixyMon, and in less than 20 minutes the VNC Viewer session crashes and I get “request timed out” and “ping: sendto: Host is down” errors from pinging the static IP address. For all this experimentation, I had PixyMon window video display set to its default setting, “Raw Video”. “Cooked Video” is no longer an action in PixyMon. Without PixyMon running I can communicate to the RPi with no “Request Timed Out” errors. It’s clear that there’s a software related issue here.

Does anybody know what could be causing this issue and how to fix it? I’d really appreciate the help.

-Cameron

#2

Thank you all who read this post and was thinking to responding! I learned that running PixyMon on the RPi tends to be pretty sketchy. You shouldn’t allow the Pixy2 to run at 61 FPS while PixyMon is running because in about 20 minutes the RPi crashed and has to be rebooted. It’s likely that I overloaded the RPi. I setup the Pixy2 field of view so that it ran the “Color Connected Components” at 30 FPS with PixyMon running and communication to the RPi didn’t crash during the 30 minute trial. I’ve concluded that 61 FPS really pushes the limit on how much video processing the RPi can accomplish and I should make sure that the “Color Connected Components” program runs at 30 FPS or less.

-Thanks again all

#3

Hello,
I suppose it could make a difference, and some of the older Raspberry Pi’s would get pretty bogged down with PixyMon. What kind of Pi are you using?

VNC is also CPU intensive. It is essentially doing video encoding and sending the video over the network. I’m not sure why the Raspberry Pi would crash, but you can definitely overtax Raspberry Pi’s. Maybe the combination is causing the Pi to get bogged down.

Edward

#4

Hi Edward!
I’m using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. You’re right, using both VNC and PixyMon simultaneously was leading to the Pi getting bogged down. I solved it by being vigilant on how many FPS the PixyMon application was running at and running it less for than 10 minutes if the FPS was over 30 FPS. Thank you for your help Edward! I appreciate it.

Cameron

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