Fruit Jam HSTX/DVI output goes dark during web request

[FoamyGuy]

This code illustrates the issue:

import time
import supervisor
import os

import adafruit_connection_manager
import board
import busio
from adafruit_esp32spi import adafruit_esp32spi
from displayio import Bitmap, TileGrid, Palette, Group
from digitalio import DigitalInOut
import adafruit_requests

BG_COLOR = 0x0000ff

display = supervisor.runtime.display

bg_bmp = Bitmap(display.width//4, display.height//4, 1)
bg_palette = Palette(1)
bg_palette[0] = BG_COLOR
bg_tg = TileGrid(bg_bmp, pixel_shader=bg_palette)

bg_group = Group(scale=4)
bg_group.append(bg_tg)
display.root_group = bg_group


# Get WiFi details, ensure these are setup in settings.toml
ssid = os.getenv("CIRCUITPY_WIFI_SSID")
password = os.getenv("CIRCUITPY_WIFI_PASSWORD")

# If you are using a board with pre-defined ESP32 Pins:
esp32_cs = DigitalInOut(board.ESP_CS)
esp32_ready = DigitalInOut(board.ESP_BUSY)
esp32_reset = DigitalInOut(board.ESP_RESET)

spi = busio.SPI(board.SCK, board.MOSI, board.MISO)
radio = adafruit_esp32spi.ESP_SPIcontrol(spi, esp32_cs, esp32_ready, esp32_reset)

print("Connecting to AP...")
while not radio.is_connected:
    try:
        radio.connect_AP(ssid, password)
    except RuntimeError as e:
        print("could not connect to AP, retrying: ", e)
        continue
print("Connected to", str(radio.ap_info.ssid, "utf-8"), "\tRSSI:", radio.ap_info.rssi)

pool = adafruit_connection_manager.get_radio_socketpool(radio)
ssl_context = adafruit_connection_manager.get_radio_ssl_context(radio)
requests = adafruit_requests.Session(pool, ssl_context)


FETCH_DELAY = 12

DATA_SOURCE = "https://cipher.foamyguy.com/static/size_tests/6363.json"

while True:
    #print("Fetching text from %s" % DATA_SOURCE)
    with requests.get(DATA_SOURCE) as response:
        response_text = response.text
        # print("-" * 40)
        # print("Text Response: ", response_text[:10])
        # print("-" * 40)

    time.sleep(FETCH_DELAY)

While the requests are being made the display output goes dark before going back to showing the blue from the background bitmap after the request completes. This one is in a loop so it will continually blink back and forth between blue and black on the display.

It seems like the SPI bus activity for the ESP32SPI web request might be blocking the display from working. But I am not sure how to validate that theory.

[FoamyGuy]

@tannewt When you have a moment I'm curious if you that thoughts on what could be causing this. I thought I recalled at one point printing causing slower refreshes and wasn't sure if that was resolved but I've eliminated all prints from the test script to rule that out, and confirmed that the display goes dark during when the request is happening by watching the server log to know its timing.

The output changing to dark interrupts the chroma key background color used by the product pick overlay project that @jedgarpark has got in the works.

[RetiredWizard]

I am seeing the same behavior on the Fruit Jam. I also see a slight variation of the issue with framebufferio displays, specifically HUB75 RGB matricies. When web requests are occurring the display flickers rapidly and random pixels light up giving a "static noise" like effect.

Issue #10031 had similar symptoms but for for flash writes, not web requests....

[tannewt]

My guess is that interrupts are being disabled by something and preventing the interrupt used to restart the next video frame. However, I'm not sure how the ESP32SPI Python-level code would cause this. Maybe a long, slow SPI transfer?

[RetiredWizard]

If the framebufferio issue is the same (and I'm thinking it's probably not now) then that's happening from an ESP32-S3 Matrixportal not an ESP coprocessor.