Allsky says starting, but never any pictures on screen, well sometimes.

[terestron]

Everytime I reboot into all sky sometimes i get picture, most time not. Log does not seem to point out any issues. Using Pi2 and pi camera IMX519.
allsky.log.txt

[EricClaeys]

@terestron,
the log file has several of these entries:

'rpicam-still' timed out.

This typically indicates a problem with the camera or the cable connecting the Pi and the camera.

There are also quite a few restarts of Allsky. Did you restart it, or did it restart itself?

This is what's timing out:

timeout 10 rpicam-still --timeout 1 --nopreview

It's possible on a Pi 2 the 10-second timeout should be longer. Try the following:

sudo systemctl stop allsky
while true; do date; timeout 10 rpicam-still --timeout 1 --nopreview || break; done

Let it run for a few hours or overnight. If it times out let me know any error message it outputs. Then try the same thing but with a 20 second timeout.

Eric

[terestron]

I think it timed out because I was running a different command outside of Allsky to check camera at same time. Yes I restarted it several times trying to get it to go from starting to running.

I reinstalled it on a RPi 3+ thinking it was computing power. However both installs never made the directory "images" I did it manually and that solved that problem. I ran it overnight and it took pictures but it never made a timelapse at end of night. In addition I let it run through the day while at work and when I got home I could not log into it via web ui. I rebooted it. logged in and still no time lapse although it shows it took a nights worth of frames. Log showed no error except for later daytime images.

2025-08-13T06:25:02.316035-07:00 allsky allsky[1386]: dmaHeap allocation failure for rpicam-apps0
2025-08-13T06:25:02.316260-07:00 allsky allsky[1386]: ERROR: *** failed to allocate capture buffers for stream ***

So..why no timelapse end of night and why the above error? Here is the newest log.

allsky.log.txt

[EricClaeys]

@terestron,
A few things I noticed in your log file:

1. Your startrails "Brightness Threshold" is too low, so you aren't getting stars with trails. See the Explanations -> Startrails Documentation page on how to determine what the setting should be.
2. You've told Allsky to upload keograms and startrails (and I assume timelapse) but you haven't told it WHERE to upload the files to. You do that in the "Websites and Remote Server Settings" section of the WebUI's "Allsky Settings" page.
3. Timelapse generation began at 5:36 am on Aug 13 and hadn't completed at 7:05 am when you restarted Allsky. That either means timelapse creation takes a LONG time on your Pi, or it hung. I've never seen it hang, so I suspect it just takes a long time. Try running date; generateForDay.sh --timelapse 20250813; date and see how long it takes to run.

For the "failed to allocate capture buffers for stream" error, let's use this Discussion, which is for that problem.