1.5 Beta 3 for BB Controllers (9/23/24)

[Aiph5u (Aiph5u (not affiliated with Onefinity))]

Hey Masrawy,

@Masrawy

BTW my power button wire inside the controller is too short, I can’t just slide the cover, at a certain point I will damage the wire and it will not pass under warranty…

be aware that depending on the controller version you have (power rocker switch vs. power pushbutton) the access to the SD card is different:

@Aiph5u

@DizzyG

I would re-flash the SD card and start from a fresh software install. the software and how to videos are available in the forums, perform a search.

I don’t think that this will help.

@Aiph5u

Usually it is never necessary to overwrite (re-flash) a Raspberry Pi OS installation (except if the SD card fails). Today, all Unixoid Operating Systems have smart package management systems . Usually unixoid operating systems have an uptime of monthes, even years, and are updated while they run – including occasionally necessary downgrade of a package. On Debian-derived systems like the Raspberry Pi OS, this is the Advanced Package Tool (APT) system which deals with deb packages.

@Aiph5u

But Onefinity simply inherited some problems from upstream when they forked it. For example, just as the ‘buildbotics-firmware’, the ‘onefinity-firmware’ package is the only package on the Raspberry Pi OS system inside the Onefinity Controller that is not packed as ‘.deb’ package and therefore cannot simply be downgraded with ‘apt-get install onefinity-firmware=1.0.9’, which would have been very helpful when Onefinity abandoned and withdraw the 1.1x branch and told people they need to reflash the entire OS on the SD card.

The reason why users sometimes are told by Onefinity to reflash the entire SD card is because the package ‘onefinity-firmware’ is not packed as .deb package, so cannot be upgraded (except by overwriting the installation by unpacking the tarball) and especially can not be downgraded with ‘apt-get install onefinity-firmware=[older_version]’). That’s why they tell the users to overwrite the whole OS on the SD card that often When the buggy 1.0* firmware was revoked by Onefinity, you could not downgrade the onefinity-firmware package as would have been the way to go if onefinity-firmware was correctly packed as .deb package. I think neither the Buildbotics Developer nor someone at Onefinity knows how to pack their firmware as a .deb package. Therefore, their firmware is installed with the ancient “unpack tarball” installation method and to avoid parts of a revoked version to remain in the system, they tell the users to reflash the entire operating system

Another opportunity to simpy overwrite the whole Operating System with a virgin SD card image is a bug in the buildbotics-derived Onefinity Controller firmware. Everytime when you upload a g-code file, it creates a subset of files that the firmware uses to run the g-code later. This sometimes leads to strange effects when you upload a file with the same name. Sometimes you would want to erase such files, especially when you know you know that you don’t need them anymore. But in this case you can erase the contents of the corresponding directories and don’t need to reflash the entire SD card.

On the other hand, reports of failing SD cards are very frequent. In this case I would not reflash the same SD card, but buy a high-quality SD card instead and put the system image on this new card.