mharsch
commented
3 years ago There is a worse version of this issue that causes Node-RED to crash and (by default) systemd attempts to restart the service. This crash sequence loops forever. The case seen in the field was when the pi-plates python package was not installed (a prerequisite to running these Node-RED nodes). The missing python package causes the node-pi-plates underlying python script to crash, then Node-RED crashes when the node-red-contrib-pi-plates node tries to write to the (now gone) python process. We need to: 1.) detect missing dependencies and log them if they're not met 2.) not crash the plate_io.py script in the above case (return an error that can be handled upstream) 3.) detect and report (via node label) this class of underlying plate communication failure
If there are unmet dependencies (such as 'pygame' for some reason), the NodeRED UI should be updated to indicate a failure to initialize the plate associated with pi-plates nodes.