Without a connection, screenly will not start

Due to a crashed SD card I had to reinstall Screenly. But arriving at the location, I couldn’t get it to work, even though it worked at home.

I found that screenly will not start anymore when a network connection is lacking. The Pi is supposed to work on WiFi (which I have troubles to activate up to now). When I am at home and connected by Ethernet cable, the Screenly starts upon booting the system. It shows me the IP-address for connecting and after a while, the loop of images and videos start.

However, when I pull the cable, the page with the IP-address will not show. (In older versions, I got the same page starting that no network IP address was found to reach the backend). Instead I get a white page, that sometimes flickers with a white square in the corner. It might go to black, but will return in white. Only when I connect the ethernet cable, I get the screenly welcome page with the IP-address again.

As soon as I see the IP-address page, I can always disconnect the network, and the system with continue running and showing the photo’s and videos as set.

FYI: The location where this Pi is/was located has no possibility for a network cable. Besides that, the wifi connection is not always pressent. Sceenly must (and always has) function regardless.

As I have been working on this for weeks now, I hope somebody here knows an answer (and perhaps can tell me why the wifi-settings are not accepted either).

Setup:

  • Pi 3b (internal wifi)
  • Pi OS without desktop
  • Screenly OS (admittedly, it was much harder to install to which I remember from a few years ago. the bash <(curl did not work flawlessly.

I managed to do a re-install with a raspberry install of lite, in stead of via the belena etcher. Doing so, solved the problem. I could also connect to the wifi via raspi-config, which wasn’t working before.

Even though I still feel it to be a Screenly related incident upon a networking issue, I can not reproduce it anymore.