An installation using 4 Pixelblazes, one in leader and 3 in follower mode has been running fine since April.
I received a message from the venue that one Pixelblaze is not showing the patterns with the other controllers. I made a backup of each Pixelblaze in a working state before leaving the installation.
If the venue technician restores the malfunctioning Pixelblaze from a backup, will it have all of the same follower and sync settings? Will it have the correct name so it automatically connects to the leader controller?
The venue is in Europe so I need to give remote instructions to the onsite tech.
Hey - just wanted to give you a quicker answer (even if not a satisfying one) since you probably want to get back to your client quickly and yet a large percentage of the people who know the answer off the top of their heads are currently supporting their own art at Burning Man.
Hopefully you have two spares with you (maybe not and that’s why you’re asking here) - you should test it so you can give them exact instructions for how to fix their install. I believe that the WiFi setup is not included in a PBB archive because then uploading it could change the connectivity. I can’t remember if the follower settings are. Sorry I can’t test for you (maybe someone else here can, but I knew I could bang out a quick encouragement to test it) - I’m also neck deep in supporting several projects right now and I can give ya 2 minutes but not 30)
The WiFI setup not being included makes sense. I have 2 spares that I can access on Monday to test. When I do then I will send instructions as well as report back definitively here.
Hi- did you figure out if restoring from a backup includes keeping its “followers”? I am having a similar struggle with my project- I connected 20+ devices in hats to a leader PB for BM, but now the hats are split between cities. What I would like to do is give them a PB that is an exact copy of my leader PB, so they can still sync their devices when we are all a part. Is there a way to do that without having to set all of the devices to follow the new leader PB?
The following state is kept only on the follower. It would be possible to use a backup to install the leader patterns on the other PBs. They will run that when the leader is out of range.
I guess my question is, is there way for a backup of the leader PB to “pickup” the followers the original PB leader had? I had thought if I duplicated the leader PB and named it the same as the original, the follower PBs would “listen” to the duplicated PB as well. How does the group sync work- are they looking for a leader chip with a specific MAC address or IP? Is there a way to clone a PB exactly to get the behavior I want?
Not really. Each follower stores a unique chip ID of the leader they are following. If you know their IP addresses you could send them a new leaderId via websocket. Something like this:
{"leaderId": 123123123}
You can get the chipId from a browser console on the leader (it’s a global), or via a getConfig command over websocket.
I’m thinking of changing it so that in a future version that followers that lose their leader should be discoverable again, and that would make it easier to find them in off grid networks, and would let you re-follow a new leader via the settings page as if they weren’t already following.