Crank app with watch/clock mouse cursor

Technical Support
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1

Hi! I’m using a Colibri iMx8 SoM on a Colibri dev board. Following Partner Demo Container - Crank Storyboard | Toradex Developer Center I’ve started a sotryboard GUI and works.

I have also enabled VNC for the weston image within docker-compose.arm64.yml.

I can see the GUI running but I can not interact with it. After a few seconds of trying to interact the mouse cursor becomes a watch/clock.

I have not seen any strange log on neither of the images nor in dmesg.

Maybe you have any idea that could help here?

Thanks in advance!

2

Greetings @lisandropm,

Just to make sure I understand everything let me summarize your issue. Please let me know if I get anything wrong.

So you’re running 2 containers, a Crank container and a Weston with VNC container. You then open a display via VNC and try to interact with the Crank GUI. This does not work and the cursor then becomes a watch/clock as if it was loading/buffering or something similar.

Did I understand that all correctly?

One question I have back to you is, what happens if you use an actual display instead of VNC? For example if you have an actual display connected and then try to interact with the Crank GUI that way do you see the same result?

I want to see if we can separate the issue from VNC or if it really is tied to VNC.

Best Regards,
Jeremias

3

Hi @jeremias.tx ,

Exactly.

So far I could not test that: I’m working remotely :slight_smile: I have asked someone on-site to try it. But in the meantime I did something else: I’ve created another container using another Storyboard app I had at hand. I could then:

  • Verify that I can reproduce the very same issue.
  • Start the Storyboard application not using the full screen. This allowed me to also interact with the weston display, as I can now reach the weston terminal icon, launch it and use it, always with the Storyboard app running. So VNC might still be an issue, but only with the Storyboard application.

I’ll get back to you once I got this very same thing tested using the screen.

4

I digged into Crank’s forum and found the article “Touch input on an iMX8M” which in turn links to this weston issue “Weston master causes mouse input to stop working with wl_shell applications”. From this last link:

After a few seconds, the cursor changes to a busy cursor, and it stops responding to mouse input, as if though it’s not responding to wl_pings (where the whole window becomes draggable).

According to the initial link a work around is to switch to GeChic monitor, whatever that is. I don’t know what’s the status of the current Torizon setup, so if anyone has any ideas I’ll be happy to check.

In the meantime I’ll try to find this myself.

5

It has just been tested. The same happens, so it’s not related to VNC.

6

Thank you for the additional research and information.

With this it seems to be a Crank specific issue with their framework. Unfortunately this issue now ventures outside of my own expertise. I’d suggest getting in contact with Crank about this. They’d probably be able to better guide you compared to Toradex support.

Best Regards,
Jeremias

7

| jeremias.tx
November 30 |

  • | - |

Thank you for the additional research and information.

With this it seems to be a Crank specific issue with their framework. Unfortunately this issue now ventures outside of my own expertise. I’d suggest getting in contact with Crank about this. They’d probably be able to better guide you compared to Toradex support.

That sounds just fine. Thanks for the heads up!

8

It seems that using kiosk-shell does the trick of removing the mouse cursor.

9

Interesting, well glad to hear the solution is relatively simple. Thank you for coming back and sharing the solution you found, it’s much appreciated.

Best Regards,
Jeremias