... to see if this is a bug in Hijack?

In another thread, I described this bug (more details below), but I wasn't sure if this is a bug in Hijack or if it was a bug in the player. This morning it happened and I noticed that Hijack's menu (press and hold to make Hijack appear) did not work when the bug happened. Although I know this is not conclusive proof of anything, in the past, if the player locked up, often Hijack would still respond. In this case, Hijack stopped responding, so that's a little more evidence.

Here are the details of the bug.

Conditions:
- Mk2 player with 2 drives.
- 2.0 beta 13 with Hijack 289 (I'm upgrading to 292 now by the way).
- Only in the car, not in the home dock.
- When starting the car.
- When "restore DC Car Visuals" is activated.

Behavior:
- Very intermittent. Has probably only happened three times in the last three weeks.
- Others have seen this bug as well, it's not just me.
- Player boots normally and goes into the player software.
- Song plays from the proper place from the last "shutdown".
- Info:Track mode is on the screen.
- Info:Track screen details are completely blank, as if it were an empty playlist. No song information, all numeric data reads null or zero.
- Top of screen says "Source:Player" and is stuck there, does not go away.
- Buttons and knob do not respond. Cannot change volume or anything.
- However, the song is still playing correctly just fine.

New behavior noticed today:
- Press-and-hold on the knob does not activate Hijack. Hijack is locked up.
- Turning off the car's ignition does not shut down the player. The player is not responding to the ignition-sense input.
- The only way to get the player fixed is to pull it out of the sled (LOUD POP- ouch).

But here's the most interesting thing:
- After putting the player back into the sled, not only does it pick up playing the song correctly again, but it does so FROM THE POINT I PULLED IT OUT OF THE SLED. So the code that's responsible for the emergency-write-to-flash-on-power-loss is still working.

Here's why I think Hijack might possibly be responsible:
- When the player boots correctly, say, in AC mode, and it boots to the info:Track screen, there is a brief moment while the info:Track screen is blank as described above. A split-second later, it fills with the track information.
- That also happens to be approximately the same instant that hijack attempts to execute the long-bottom-button-press to switch to DC visuals.

My uneducated non-empeg-programmer guess is that there is some sort of a race condition happening, with the player trying to grab a resource at the same time Hijack is. Perhaps something related to the input hardware, or the track "notify" information being spit out on the serial port. Something like that.

I will also concede that it still could be a bug in the default software, it's hard to tell since I haven't seen anyone report it who wasn't running Hijack with DC visuals.

Any ideas?

I wonder if it could be related to this, I only just thought of this one...

Sometimes Restore DC Visuals doesn't work in the following way:

- After booting, I notice it did not restore the visuals. The screen is correctly on info:track, the menu has not appeared.

- I attempt to adjust the volume. Instead of the volume adjusting, the main menu appears and my knob-turns now scroll the menu.

- The menu does not appear UNTIL I have turned the volume knob. Then it appears instantly and goes to the item that I have scrolled to. I don't remember if I see the menu scrolling-animation or if it just blinks to that menu item.

Is it possible that this is a manifestation of the same problem, only less severe?

Tony, is it possible you still have an "initial" code in your ir_translate section that was trying to switch info modes? For back when restore visuals *really* wasn't working... I had behavior similar to what you're talking about when I had both restore visuals enabled AND an ir_translate code which would execute a long-press of the down button. It was kind of a workaround and I forgot to take it out.

Negative. I removed all of the "initial" stuff as soon as Mark re-did the code for the DC car visuals.

For reference, the relevant sections of config.ini on my player look like this:

[hijack]
suppress_notify=1
voladjlow=0x1500,400,0x1000,200,1100
voladjmed=0x1700,600,0x1000,200,600
voladjhigh=0x2200,1000,0x1000,100,500
keypress_flash=100
disable_bassboost_FM=1
volume_boost_FM=-2
volume_boost_AM=-6
volume_boost_AUX=4
[output]
notify=1
[serial]
car_rate=115200