Troubleshooting

System Continuously Rebooting

The system will reboot whenever something goes wrong (i.e. disconnected from network, software hangs or kernel crashes). This is accomplished using the hardware watchdog as well as software watch scripts. It is therefore possible that the system enter an indefinite reboot loop if, for example, the network is misconfigured. You can disable this behavior by turning off the Network Link Watch option in the Expert Settings section.

System Won't Boot

Make sure:

• you have used the OS image that is suitable for your board
• you have extracted the gzipped OS image before writing it to the card
• you use an SD card that is compatible with your board

Before reporting an issue, you should:

• try using another SD card (preferably a different model)
• try "burning" images of other OSes that normally work on your device and see if that works

Date & Time

A HTTP request is normally used to synchronize the system time, so make sure the Internet connection is working and allows direct connections on port 80. Initial date is set upon each boot and is updated every 15 minutes. The local time is established by the time zone setting in the web UI. You can tweak some date-related options in the Expert Settings section.

Shell Access

If you connect a monitor and a keyboard to your board, you'll be prompted to login in the text console. root is the username and the password is your administrator's password that you had configured in the UI. If you haven't configured it (i.e. you left it empty), the password is the serial number of your unit. Don't worry, the serial number is part of motionPie's hostname and will appear as part of the welcome banner when you're prompted for a password. For your convenience, you can use admin as an alias for the root user.

You can also log into your motionPie using ssh or putty. It listens on the standard 22 port, unless you tweaked the system otherwise.

Wireless Connection Problems

Make sure you have a WPA/WPA2-enabled wireless network; other security/encryption methods won't work with motionPie.

Check that you don't have extra spaces or tabs around the configured network name and key.

Network Shares

Wrong values for the network share settings will stop the camera from working at all. You need to know exactly what your share parameters are and to carefully input them in the UI. The easiest way to tell the various parameters is by understanding an example. Consider the following share path (as it appears in Windows Explorer's location bar):

\\192.168.0.1\myshare1\some\path

• 192.168.0.1 is obviously the IP address of the network server and goes in the field named Network Server; you may also use the server's NetBIOS name (usually the hostname) instead of the IP address;
• myshare1 is the name of the share and goes in the field named Share Name
• \some\path is the path relative to the share; it goes in the field named Root Directory, after changing backslashes to forward slashes (i.e. /some/path)
• needless to say, your credentials (not visible in the example) go in the Share Username and Share Password fields

Avoid using spaces or special characters in your share names, credentials and any directories that make up the relative path.

Streaming Hangs When Using ZoneMinder

When motionPie is used as a network camera for ZoneMinder or any other application that deals with network cameras, the MJPEG video streaming may occasionally hang. The reason is that the motion daemon itself hangs (due to buggy V4L2 drivers?).

When you use the motionEye web UI to check out your cameras, there's a builtin mechanism that detects stalled streams and restarts motion. Now, when you use ZoneMinder you probably don't even open the motionEye web UI and therefore the mechanism never kicks in.

motionPie has a simple workaround for this precise issue: there's a Motion Keep-alive option under the Expert Settings section in the settings panel. Simply enable this option and the motion hanging detection mechanism will be permanently on. This option is not enabled by default due to a small performance penalty.