Just a very quick post.
I’m working on a small project I’ve had in mind for a few months, basically pull and image and display it on the tv (there’s more to it, or I’d just settle for RasBMC).
So I’ve been coding it all up using python with pygame to display the image, all fine.
Then I introduced loops to refresh the images, and update the display. I had issues around other code and couldn’t keep looking at the tv while the code was running so I introduced a few mp3’s to play as the images were being refreshed and as the display was updating. All worked well, it sounded like I was on the Enterprise.
Further into coding up different functions, and some more headaches I’d cleared up alot of the minor error’s I had been getting, and was now ready to push the system to speed up the refreshes.
I’d managed to put a few images to refresh every second, and it appeared to be going well.
Then it stopped making a sound, checked and python had crashed with error:
glibc detected *** /usr/bin/python: double free or corruption (fasttop)
So I changed the code I’d been working on (clearly that’s the problem, didn’t have this earlier), but nope didn’t solve it.
Onto google, but this brought up alot of big reports about other things. checked a few, made a few changes. but I’m still getting the problem. Troubling though, if this is going to come down to the fact I’m refreshing alot and it’s getting intensive, it’s going to be a show stopper for this project.
Thankfully I did a little more searching and came across
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=36878&p=308220
Now I dont have the same problem (playing wav’s) but this drew me to the fact I’m playing mp3’s and these have increased in how much I’m playing them and they now overlap alot more than earlier.
So I decided to drop them out. Eureka it’s been running about 15 minutes and not died (previously a few minutes), sad thing is I’m now kinda missing my beeps.
I had hoped to be able to play an alert sound, if certain events happened so I may have to rethink how I can do so without causing crashes.
Anyways there it is in case it’s of help to someone else. I’ll be posting about the project at a later date, once I’ve done a little more with the code and tested it a bit more. It’s my first serious attempt in python, I can make programmers cry at the best of times so I’m expecting people to be able to rip this apart (but I’m actually very interested in getting it stable, so will welcome the criticism/ideas.