Hi everyone,
Unfortunately, I’ve encountered a rather annoying issue over the past few days. Everything was working fine until recently, but a few days ago, when I turned on the Pi in the morning and tried to open the UI, the Pi’s internet settings were gone—it disconnected from the Wi-Fi, and even a reboot didn’t help. I reinstalled the system, but the same thing happens with a fresh setup as soon as I reload the flow.
I tried not installing the external libraries in Node-RED right away, but even then, as soon as I try to open the UI, the Pi’s network interface crashes, and only a full reinstall fixes it. I have no idea what could’ve changed overnight—when I shut everything down in the evening, it was working perfectly.
The problem is, there’s a lot of work in the current project, and I need to continue—it’s not something I want to or even can abandon, but I’m stuck and can’t make progress like this.
Has anyone experienced something similar?
Thanks in advance for any help!
When you say "UI" - do you mean the Editor or one of the Dashboards?
Also, assuming you are using an SD-Card on the Pi, do you have a spare? Feels a bit like a corrupt card.
And before you do anything else, make sure you have a backup of the .node-red folder.
If the above fails, you might want to consider is the Power Supply you are using for the RPi. Is it rated high enough. The load could be dragging the supply down and causing erratic drop-outs of the RPi.
Thank you very much for the responses!
By "UI" I mean both the programming interface and the dashboard—this freezing issue has occurred on both interfaces.
An SD card error could be a realistic cause; I've checked the power supply, and it's fine.
I tried a new, definitely good SD card, installed a completely fresh Raspberry Pi system on it, and then installed Node-RED. After that, I restored the flows and the necessary nodes. As soon as I hit deploy and then tried to open the dashboard, the Pi's WiFi stopped working again.
What sort of Pi is it?
Do you have access to another one?
A USB wifi dongle?
Raspberry Pi 4 with the 64bit Pi OS.
Unfortunatelly, I have only this Pi.
With USB WiFi dongle I can connect to the WiFi and use it on the Pi (so I can open websites on it for example), but still can't reach the Node-RED website (the IP that opens the editor and dashboard). The Pi Connect sometimes works with the dongle, but it is full random when it works or not.
Update: I just discover that the sound module is dies too. It can't play any sound now.
It is unclear what you mean by that. Do you mean you are running a browser on the pi and from there can view websites via the internet?
Where are you running the browser when you try to connect to the pi?
What do you see in the browser when it doesn't work?
On the pi open a command window and run
sudo journalctl -f
which will show you the system log. Leave that window open and try to connect to node-red. Do you see anything suspicious in the log?
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, let me clarify: Yes, I opened the browser directly on the Pi and searched for websites from there. This worked when a USB WiFi dongle was plugged into the device.
On my desktop computer, I usually connect using Google Chrome to Pi Connect, and I also edit Node-RED from there when these are working. When they are not working, Pi Connect either gives me a timeout message or the interface says the Pi was last seen X time ago. For Node-RED, I get the message: "This site can’t be reached, [IP address] took too long to respond."
After a fresh install, I restore the Node-RED project and try to monitor the logs to see if anything indicates what might be disabling both audio playback and internet modules on the Pi. Thank you for the suggestion.
