Norns: help

[SPIKE]

A BIT OF A PANIC…

Low Battery Warning

i have a big performance tomorrow and this just popped up all of a sudden during my rehearsal.

i NEVER use norns without it plugged in.

is there a quick fix for this?

any emergency help is GREATLY appreciated!

[corpusjonsey]

USB battery charger? Man that’s a bummer.

[dan_derks]

definitely concerning to see when you aren’t expecting it at all – have you tested different USB cables and alternate sources of power (computer USB, power strip USB, cell phone charger)?

[tehn]

seems like it may be battery failure.

let me figure out a way to short term disable the alarm text

[SPIKE]

thanks a million!

not sure if it will affect things…i did shut it down and left it powered while i had a rehearsal with one of my bands.

just came back in and changed the USB PSU and a different miniUSB cable just to troubleshoot.
i booted it back up and it doesn’t currently have the Low Battery warning.

it’s plugged in and currently displaying this for it’s power usage…shouldn’t it display something a bit different if it’s plugged in?

thanks for all the help!

[tehn]

the top row BAT shows battery percentage (100%)

next to that is -233mA which is the power draw or charge. negative means the battery is draining, positive means charging.

perhaps you plugged into a bad charger and the battery just ran down? seems its full now, but not charging.

yes, absolutely keep an eye on this stuff before a show!

[mimetaur]

Something that would be super helpful in the Norns docs would be a little hardware related section.

I’ve been having some trouble tracking down a couple things on lines, but I’m sure it is floating around across the various Norns threads:

• What WiFi dongle does the Norns come with if I wanted to replace it? And having access to a short list of “known to work” dongles would be awesome, like that powerful one with the serious antenna for instance.
• If I need a new power adapter what should I get? I tracked down the USB power adaptor recommended specs in another thread (2A / 5.25v I think)
• Power data on the Norns has been a little hard for me to figure out too, this post helped me a ton in understanding what those specs mean.

I have been a little confused particularly around power, the battery, and battery usage since I got my Norns. I mostly leave It plugged in, but I’m not sure that’s the best practice.

(Some of this stuff is probably hard to document because USB / network gear is so incredibly cheap and commodified, model names are hard to even identify. It’s just like “USB CHARGER PHONE ANDROID 2A” or whatever.)

[dan_derks]

sounds super helpful, yeah! thank you for the suggestions + looping back after searches. we overhauled the structure of the docs and some super critical info, but these are really great gaps to identify.

quick stuff:

What WiFi dongle does the Norns come with if I wanted to replace it?

did you end up searching any phrases in the documentation? dongle deffo isn’t in there, but replace nub is. unfortunately, Just The Docs search is a little underpowered (no metrics), so we can’t learn through usage. any feedback would be dope! anyway, you can purchase a new one here or email help@monome.org for a $10 (shipping incl.) replacement.

If I need a new power adapter what should I get? I tracked down the USB power adaptor recommended specs in another thread (2A / 5.25v I think)

yep, those are the specs. this is a direct replacement (GEO151UB-6020): https://www.bc-robotics.com/shop/5v-2a-usb-power-supply/. EDIT: Nathan pointed out the Adafruit one is the same and in stock! good to have in the docs, for sure.

Power data on the Norns has been a little hard for me to figure out too, this post helped me a ton in understanding what those specs mean.

oo, can you link the post plz? happy to scavenge it for better power data docs

I mostly leave It plugged in, but I’m not sure that’s the best practice.

totally fine, imo. I don’t think mine ever gets unplugged unless I’m recording/performing.

[mimetaur]

Thanks Dan! These are great resources. Definitely some of it is my own search-term matching. (Doesn’t help that there aren’t “definitive” terms to describe accessories the way there is with the gear itself ie nub vs dongle.)

I’m more of a browser than a searcher when it comes to docs, so being able to get there through a “hardware” or “accessories” subpage (or subsection of a page) would help those of us who use that navigation method.

Regarding the helpful post I referred to - see @tehn’s two or three posts up - even that short breakdown of percentage vs battery gain/loss was super helpful for me!

Also looks like that power supply is currently back ordered at BC Robotics but they have it at Adafruit

[simonvanderveldt]

@dan_derks I think part of it is that we don’t have anything in the docs on this additional “layer” of the home screen that shows battery status, CPU usage, etc (like how to get there and what does it show).

[tehn]

they have it at Adafruit

i actually order these in bulk from adafruit, so they will be the same thing.

[dan_derks]

for sure! seems like it’d fit in real nicely in norns > play

[jkile9]

Wasn’t sure whether to put this here or in the MLR thread. I’m considering getting a Norns and am having a hard time figuring out if it’s possible to be playing MLR while also recording the session to memory in the background? I’d really love to use Norns as a general field recorder almost but ideally I’d like to be able to save recordings of my sessions if at all possible. Is that currently supported?

EDIT: though I suppose I’m using Mlr as the main example, this applies to most scripts really.

[Jonny]

Yes, that one thing that the TAPE feature does, it can record the audio output to a file.

[jkile9]

Awesome! I wasn’t sure if that was something that could only be done to incoming audio without running other scripts simultaneously. Sounds like it’ll be perfect then!

[jlmitch5]

New nub works great, getting in the -40s in the same spot I was getting -60s

[bemerritt]

I can do some further investigation, but just wanted to chime in that I am having recording problems as well, similar to what was noted earlier. Number seems to be advancing but it just goes blank once hitting record.

Before hitting record

After hitting record

Bonus pic of what it looked like before I restarted a couple times

[tehn]

can you check maiden while doing this process to see if there are any errors?

[ether]

Is there a list of temp or other norns folders it’s safe to delete to reclaim disk space, or a built-in script to do this?

Disk full!

I did a forum search as I remember this coming up a while back, but couldn’t find anything.

Also, how / when does the Norns disk free display update? Mine stills shows as 0 mb after deleting various audio files.

EDIT : after googling some Linux stuff : /var/tmp get’s cleaned on restart, and I maybe need to do something with /var/log (mine is 1.8 GB) … logrotate something?

Aside - man there’s a ton of files and folders in Linux… have there been thoughts about trimming totally unnecessary cruft???

[dan_derks]

logrotate

I think this is supposed to be done automatically (?)

from up-thread:

Norns: help

delete the kern.log sudo rm -rf /var/log/kern.log (if you want to be extra helpful, see upthread for how to send us a snippet of kern.log before delting it so we can try and see what is doing that… but it will surely continue to happen so no worries there) it’s “right” in the sense of, yes, it really is taking up that much space it’s “wrong” in every other sense. @tehn et al we should probably address this behavior. i can pitch in with eliminating excess logging from crone and matron. it se…

please check out that one and the posts thereabouts and let us know!