Help!!! im drowning in all this salt water =) NOT Another reef pi raspberry thread

[Eugene233]

Hey guys
Thank you for stopping by my thread. im starting this thread because i am getting into the lighting game and would love to figure out why i cant get a signal out of my gpio pinout on my raspberry pi 4 running reef pi.
little bit about me and my back ground, i started playing with electronics at a very young age. i understand the concept of programimg but never really got too involved, you could say i had different influences in my life, went towards HVAC, still have a very strong understanding of low and high voltage.
now i do i have a little weapon under my belt i call him the devouring coordinator lol. my little brother, i say that because he is a very good programmer and has been doing it since he was 12 and he is 24 now but he has some medical issues and is currently in the hospital being watched, he has grand mal seizures and its a scary thing but everything is ok i dont want any one thinking he is in a bad place. he's not ucla is working with him and they are amazing. but anyways he's not able to really help me because the issue he does have hurts his memory, so it can be challenging getting help from him. so i have decided i shall ask my friendly reef community and hope someone out there has a little time they can spend on replying or helping me understand what i am doing wrong. guys i truly do appreciate everything


with the reef pi i have installed the os on to the micro sd card
configured the raspberry pi before i installed reef pi
i have to enable dev mod to be able to add jacks and what not but when i go into lighting and check pwm0 pin i dont get any voltage change.
when i do command line for pwm0 i can see the voltage change. but not through reef pi.

 

[WIReefer]

First off welcome to R2R!!! I’m sorry to hear that about your brother. Let’s see if we can get someone to help you out! Bump

 

[Michael Lane]

Hi. Welcome to reef2reef and thanks for trying reef-pi!

A couple things stand out to me. We have a known issue with pi4 that causes a problem with connectors, but we're working on a fix. It seems like the problem only shows up on a pi4 with an updated version of the OS. I would expect that to be included in an upcoming release.

You almost certainly don't want to enable Dev mode. For the most part, that bypasses the hardware functionality and runs everything in a fake mode. I'd recommend using a pi3 if you have one available. Otherwise, you'll probably need to reformat your SD card and reinstall raspbian without running upgrade.

 

[Eugene233]

hey, sorry for the late reply. i ended up finally upgrading to my dream tank, 100 gallon acrylic, lost a few fish on the way. my media reactor broken, ugh dont we all just love the hobby. lol.
i finally had some time to sit down and try out some of the recommendation and so far what i am getting is after the install of reef-pi i start it up log in and this is what i get under the connections tab

Something went wrong.
TypeError: Cannot read property 'analog-input' of null
in t in div in div in div in div in div in t in Connect(t) in div in div in t in div in t in t in div in div in div in div in t in Connect(t) in t in a

• Documentation |
• Wed Sep 2 08:38:57,
• running 3.0,
• since 27 seconds ago |
• IP 192.168.1.72 |
• Errors(0)

im not sure what this means or if there is any easy fix for it
if it requires heavy programming and not just a few lines to be replaced, i rather order a pi3.
im not a programmer but from what i understand the reef-pi is not communicating to the pi4 hardware correctly, if there is even a path for the reef-pi to communicate through to the gpio's and whats not.
please advise that way i can either order a new pi3 or fix this issue.
for the record i have researched this issue and i get python programming information which is like kinda french and Korean to me. i see it i hear it but for the life of me i cant make sense of it. from what i understand i would need to take some kinda series python programming classes to understand what is going on. like i have said i am doing my best to understand but this is a little above my knowledge.

 

[Michael Lane]

I hadn't heard of anyone experiencing this issue without running upgrade on the OS, but I suppose it could depend on your original image. This isn't something that a typical user would be able to troubleshoot since it is an issue in one of the libraries that reef-pi uses.

A rpi3 is typically more than powerful enough for reef-pi, so that would probably be the quickest, easiest way forward.