Is there a "best practice" for safe shutdown with a phy.button? And ...

top-specci

Hi,
I google a lot and found lot of discussions and "solutions" (Threads, youtube-videos, scripts at Github, ...),
but often they are older or not "good" (not stopping emulatorstation and possible data lose (gamelist.xml ...).

Is there an actuall "best practice" what is prefered and "working" ?

I plan to use a physical button to shutdown the Retropie.

When the button is pressed for longer than 3 seconds:

Emulatorstation should be stopped correctly
A short Shutdown-sound should be played
Shutdown-picture should be displayed for 2 seconds
RetroPie should be going down

Thats all ;-)

Thanks for usefull hints and tipps,
Martin

mitu

@top-specci said in Is there a "best practice" for safe shutdown with a phy.button? And ...:

Is there an actuall "best practice" what is prefered and "working" ?

Make sure that any emulators are stopped first, then EmulationStation is stopped and then you can order the shutdown of the system.

WeirdH

@top-specci I use this one. It is super versatile and does all the proper quitting that Emulationstation needs to not lose metadata and such.

Granted, there is a bit of reading up and fiddling around involved, but I now have a dedicated button (hooked up to some GPIO pins) that does a beautiful and clean shutdown.

top-specci

Issue solved, see my next post

Hi,
I had now create a "mix" from several ideas from the web, seems to work ... but ...

On one Pi it's working fine,
On the other Pi (for me totally unclear), the restart from the "emulatorstation" will not be executed when the script was started from cron. When start the script on shell, everything is working.
I check also the rights from folder and files.

Also when started from cron: If I replace the line were the emulatortastation should be started again with a test line (showing an background-image), the image is shown! So the script is running fine, but why will emulatorstation not started?
Any ideas?
( I also add the full path to: os.system("/usr/bin/emulatorstation"), did not help )

Hint: Short push (0.8s) will restart the emulatorstation, longer pushing the button will shutdown the Pi.

 #!/usr/bin/env python
import time
import os
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

switch = 5   #  GPIO-Pin Number!
delay = 0.8
debounce = 0.2

GPIO.setwarnings(False)
GPIO.setmode (GPIO.BOARD)
GPIO.setup(switch,GPIO.IN,pull_up_down = GPIO.PUD_UP)

while True:
   if GPIO.input(switch) == 0 :
      time.sleep(debounce)
      start_time = time.time()
      while GPIO.input(switch) == 0 :
         if time.time() - start_time > delay - debounce:
            time.sleep(0.5)
            os.system ("sudo fbi -T 1 -noverbose /home/pi/shutdown.png")
            time.sleep(1.2)
            if GPIO.input(switch) == 0 :
               os.system ("sudo fbi -T 1 -noverbose /home/pi/shutdown-now.png")
               time.sleep(2.0)
               os.system ("sudo shutdown -h 0")
            else:
               time.sleep(1)
               os.system("emulationstation")
               # os.system ("sudo fbi -T 1 -noverbose /home/pi/restart.png") # Testline!
               time.sleep(1)
   else:
      time.sleep(debounce)

top-specci

Argggh,
found the reason for the problem written before:
I add the cron for user "root", this is incorrect! Must be for user pi !
root user is not allowed to start "emulatorstation".

@reboot /usr/bin/python /home/pi/mshutdown.py