I have 3 android (samsung galaxy tab) that I use with Homey Dashboard to control the lighting in different rooms. The problem I have is that the dashboard seem to crash almost every day. Most of the times it have either frozen or by itself returned to normal Homey front tab, or sometimes the app itself has crashed. This is a big hazzle as I need to walk around in the house to ensure theese dashboards work all the time and it has a very low WAF(Wife acceptance factor) when its almost always down when my wife needs to use the screens.
Is there any way to make this more stable, or is there other dashboard that are more stable?
I did use HDashboards for a while too but that app could freeze many times a day and needed to be completely closed and restarted again before it worked.
This is something I am currently investigating. This seems to be an issue with certain dashboard widgets on iOS devices. Providing a list of widgets might be able to help us tracking down the culprit. We are currently running test to find and resolve this issue. Unfortunately, this takes a while before we get the results. If you want to actively help us solve this issue, try to remove certain widgets for a day, Lights, insights and the Energy widget seem to have some effect.
Im using:
DataVista, Enhanced Device Widget, WidgetBoard and Widgey on the dashboards.
Also using showing an webpage, and the normal included widgets like lights, zone, sliders and flows
I cant remove lights from dashboard though, is the main point of it - controlling the lights in the house
You can start by removing (or disabling) all 3rd party widgets you mention.
If the dash stops crashing, you can find the faulty widget(s) by adding/enabling them one by one.
No its just as bad no matter what - I have 3 pads and all are crashing randomly now and then, normally one or severals dashboards crashes every day . Very unstable
I have two identical tablets (Samsung Galaxy Tab A SM-T510).
One has only dashboard widgets which are being offered by Athom, the other has a mix of Athom and DataVista widgets.
The one with only Athom widgets uses Devices, Insight, Logic and Camera widgets. This tablet is very, very stable. For over one week the screen shows my dashboard stable and steady.
The other is a disaster, one to two hours, no longer, than the Homey app stops working.
I use the simple gauge, label, progress bar, line chart and status badge.
With this in mind, can you conclude that Datavista widgets are no good? No, I don’t think so. I love these widgets more than the “original” ones. But the integration with Homey needs some improvements…
I use the Homey Android test version 9.2.0
Datavista is version 0.10.2
I am still looking into this iOS between other responsibilities but this will be take some time to figure out. It unfortunately not a simple issue. It demands a lot of testing (running tablets for days) and looking into subsystems. if you are experiencing issues, try to remove certain widgets (lights, insights, etc) and see if that makes any difference. Any information I can get would be useful to help me solve this faster.
This sounds like an issue with the DataVista widgets. Android has currently no issue with any of the Homey widgets (at least not that we are aware of). We have seen that certain app widget can cause certain Android devices to show similar behaviour when using features like the canvas api. The app developer should take this into account when developing a widget.
Hey @gerard_athom, I’m the developer of the DataVista app, and I haven’t seen any documentation or guidance from Athom about limitations around using the Canvas API in widgets.
I don’t consider myself doing anything unusual, though for some widgets I am using a charting library that might be doing more intensive drawing under the hood. That said, I wonder if this is more about overall dashboard performance — maybe even related to the number of widgets shown at once, or memory management within Homey — rather than a specific issue with the app/canvas api?
I’m already working on shifting more logic to the main app, but if there’s anything else widget devs should consider, I’d love to hear about it. Happy to discuss it here or privately if that works better, as I’d love to fix any issues my app could potentially cause.
There is no documentation or guidance on it because we only recently saw a case were an app widget is using the Canvas API extensively, which causes a performance decrease on Android devices. This seems to be a thing on Android devices in combination the hardware acceleration, which is beneficial for most widgets but doesn’t handle Canvas as well. We are still debating what would be the best way to handle this or if we can do something about this from our side.
We have seen that using the Canvas API (heavily) can impact the entire dashboard, even a dashboard that was performing well without the widget. Ideally we would like to run widgets within a sandbox within the app. So they wouldn’t impact the rest of the dashboard or make the app stop responding. This has nothing to do with the number of widgets or memory management of the app, even having a single app widget that heavily uses the Canvas API can achieve this. We have tested this on pretty new flagship devices and this seems to be the case always with Android devices and the Canvas API. This only counts for app widget, all the Homey widgets are native.
In the mean time I would suggest to limit the amount of time you draw using the Canvas API or switch things to CSS/JS side if you don’t necessarily need the Canvas API.
I am aware of your issues and have looked into it. Unfortunately I have not found anything related to the lights (zone) widget. I am asking other people in this thread to find a common denominator.
But since you are here, can you tell me a bit more about your situation? So I can more easily reproduce this. Do you have a lot of lights attached to this widget? Do you or do the widget toggle their onOff state a lot? Any additional information would make it easier for me to recreate a similar scenario
