Was running V3.72 on my Cerbo GX with a GX Touch 70 screen when I noticed the Moon with the zZ in the upper right corner. I touched it to see what would happen and the screen turned off but there was no way to turn it back on without rebooting. After the reboot everything was fine for a day or two IDK how long but I left the boat and returned to find the screen off with no way to wake it up without a reboot. Before posting here I figured I should upgrade to the latest firmware so I did V3.75 Large and I got the same behavior. When this happens the Cerbo is still running fine and I can connect to the V2 Gui via my PC on my network and initiate the reboot. After looking at it over several days I noticed Support Status was red so I drilled in and found the RootFS was corrupt so I re-applied V3.75 and rebooted and that error went away but still same behavior after what I think is a day the screen blanks out and can not be touched awake so I have to reboot. I read past posts and there is a suggestion that an HDMI extension cable will cause this behavior but I have been running this way for a year and half with a high quality extension cable and the problem just started after I touched the Moon/zZ. Can I disable this feature? Are there log files in the OS I can look at to see if there are HDMI communication errors being thrown? My Start Page Timeout is set to NEVER so I’m expecting the display to never blank…
@Karl-Heinz thanks for the input and that’s possible but not exactly easy. I’m on a 55’ Motor Yacht and the battery compartment is one deck down and about 10’ forward of my GX Touch 70 which is mounted next to my main power distribution panel. Having to go through a water tight door, down below deck and than forward through another water proof bulkhead to access the GX Touch is not practical but for debug purposes is possible. I reached out to my Victron Salesrep and shared my post and he suggested it wasn’t the HDMI extension that could be problematic but more likely the USB extension which provides power to the display. He suggested using a plugin USB power supply to the GX Touch 70’s USB input.
B4 stepping to a USB Power supply I thought I’d baseline what is the voltage current draw on that USB supply line at the GX Touch 70. I have a plugin USB power display that showed 5.0Vdc at the USB extension cable B4 plugging in the GX Touch 70. Once I plugin the GX Touch 70 the voltage drops to 4.6-4.7V and current draw is 100ma. I discovered connecting/disconnecting these HDMI and USB connections behind the display woke the display up so now I no longer have to reboot the Cerbo to wake up the display.
I have no other USB devices plugged into my Cerbo so it’s not like I’m drawing a ton of power from the Cerbo and both the HDMI and USB extensions I used were high quality cables for the 15’ run from my battery compartment space to my power panel. The GX Touch 70 comes with a 3’/1M long HDMI/USB cable and no where can I find in the documentation to not use an extension so I’m hard pressed to believe that’s the problem. This has worked fine for 18 months and only started when I touched the Moon/zZ symbol when running V3.72 and V3.75. Today I touched the symbol and the screen blanked out but after a minute I touched the screen and it woke right back up which is NOT the behavior I have seen in the past. I suspect I have to let it be for several more hours or overnight for the problem to present itself again. With the power monitor showing me data it will be interesting to see what those valves are when the screen locks up…
@Justin THANKS for pointing out that subtle nuance buried somewhere in the manuals about not using extension cables but FWIW I had been running for 18 months without any problems using a 16’ USB extension and 15’ HDMI extension. Both fairly high quality cables with gold plated pins and supporting the latest USB/HDMI standards BUT the one thing I didn’t do and you must do on a boat for all data cable connections like this is fill the connectors with PTFE grease AND tape the connectors together. Since I plugged in my USB power meter my screen blanking problem has not happened for the past 3.5 days. I’m now thinking it was a loose or weak connection as I forgot to fill these two connections with grease and I didn’t tape the connections together. SO given my success the past three days plus I removed my USB power meter and cleaned the contacts in both connectors with spray contact cleaner. I then filled them with PTFE grease and taped them together. On boats, the constant presence of high heat/humidity/moisture and the movement of the boat can work connections like this loose over time. My boat is pretty big/nice and usually air conditioned so the humidity problem is not as great when compared to smaller unconditioned boats. I even have the touch the Moon/zZ blanking my display correctly and a quick tap on the screen wakes it back up so unless the problem returns I’m gonna say case closed on this problem.
As an FYI for what has been working for me these are the two extension cables I used:
