Meta-Q: Display going weird under certain circumstances

[mxmxmx]

Meta-Q: Display going weird under certain circumstances

[patrickdowling]

Are you using a pre-compiled .hex? While it might be related to the latest changes that type of display corruption has been reported when compiling using any version of arduino/teensyduino higher than (IIRC) 1.8.1/1.35. It seems independent of the actual app that's running.

There seems to be some kind of timing issue or interaction with the libraries that's hard to diagnose and I've never been able to reproduce it.

[Triscus]

At first I used self-complied v1.3.6a from the dev136 branch (Arduino 1.8.8 and Teensyduino 1.4.5 on Windows 10) but I was able to reproduce the behaviour with the latest v1.3.6 pre-compiled release.

[timchurches]

I think Max mentioned that he was now using the latest version of Arduino/Teensyduino to compile the hex for releases and no issues had been encountered. But seems like that may not be the case. As Patrick says, it is very non-deterministic, and seems to happen randomly. Try compiling with Arduino 1.8.1 and Teensyduino 1.35 as Patrick suggests. On past experience, that will solve the problem. Hopefully the latest code still fits when compiled like that.

[mxmxmx]

mmh, yeah, i was secretly hoping that issue had disappeared. i've now replaced the hex compiled with the older gcc: https://github.com/mxmxmx/O_C/releases/tag/1.3.6 ...

had to disable a bunch of preset scales to make it compile; not sure how they compile the "VOR" branch (in as much that won't compile without disabling even more scales)

[timchurches]

Just BTW, the earlier versions of Arduino such as v1.8.1 as required by o_C don’t run under macOS 10.15 (Catalina), so think twice before upgrading. I didn’t. Luckily I also have an ancient MacBook Air running macOS 10.13...

[mxmxmx]

ah, good to know ... (i haven't yet).

@Triscus can you let us know if that was it? thanks

[patrickdowling]

Yeah, it'd be good to know if it goes away again with 1.8.1.
I'm kind of torn on the issue... I'd really like to know what's causing it, but the turn-around times and clunky tooling mean there's a lot of inertia to overcome.

Arduino isn't the only victim of 10.15, it's also older versions of avr-gcc and other compilers.

[Triscus]

The latest per-compiled version works. I was able to reproduce the issue with an older version right away.

I also compiled the latest version with Arduino 1.8.1 and Teensyduino 1.3.5 . The Optimization Option in Arduino needed to be 'Smallest Code' as the code was about 500 Bytes too large when set to 'Faster'. I ran it for a couple of minutes and it seems to work.

[mxmxmx]

ok, thanks for trying ...

re optimization, this branch does/should compile with "faster" (-O2); i haven't pulled this over into the master branch (but you can simply use the pre-release hex, that's the same thing). interesting to know though that it seems to worked with -Os ...