Multiple Unleasheds triggering going out of control (yes, really!)

[Unfoolishly]

Hi Oliver and Andy,

I am not sure if you are already familiar with this bug: multiple Unleasheds, when triggered by the App using the "trigger all" shutter button, come into a state which randomly and out of nowhere start to take photos on their own, without having pressed any shutter button in the App.

Yes, this is a weird bug, but it really happened yesterday. I have two witnesses who saw it happening too, so I am not going mental or seeing ghosts ;-)

This is what happened: I used a setup of three Nikon camera's (D7100's) and used the Unleashed App to trigger them ALL at once to take photo's. I pressed the "trigger all" shutter release button in the App several times repeatedly (say 10 times in a row). The Unleasheds did take the photo's but something happened what I did not expect and is certainly not preferred behavior.

1. Not all camera's took 10 photo's, even if they were all connected to the App and All were active during the pressing of the "trigger all" button.
2. After the camera's took the 10 photo's (or less), all camera's came to rest and were active but idle.
3. After a while some camera's suddenly start taking photo's out of the blue. First, one camera suddenly triggered and took a photo, then another camera, but not the 'third' camera (that last one kept idle, not taking a photo at all). The other two camera's kept taking photo's in some delay moment. I had to turn off the camera's to prevent them from keep taking photo's. I did not use the App in that period of time, but the App was sending GPS data towards ALL Unleasheds.
4. Not all camera's went off at the same moment I pressed the "trigger ALL" button in the App. I was expecting this! The delay was significant enough to notice: not simultaneously.

I don't know what happened, but the Unleasheds were behaving as if they were operated by ghosts! Really strange behavior!

I am not sure if this is caused by the Android App and/or by the firmware of the Unleashed?

Do you have any idea by what this was caused? I was flabbergasted that it even could happen at all!

My two witnesses first thought that I was playing a trick on them, but when they saw my surprised look on my face, they knew I was just as surprised as their were! What is happening??

Could you please have a deeper look in the code what might have caused this "race condition"? Thanks!

Greetings,
Unfoolishly

[Andy]

Sounds like an app issue. I will create a ticket to check it out.

[Unfoolishly]

Sounds like an app issue. I will create a ticket to check it out.

Great! My assumption is that there is somehow some sort of queueing involved in the App which does not get emptied correctly, or race conditions occur. Another thing I noticed is the random occuring of the triggering. One camera fired once, while a second camera fired multiple times in a row, then the second camera fired again and then the first camera again. And this in a continues sequence of pseudo random occurence. Strange! The third camera did stop at 10 times, so something is surely "out of control" in the App.

Too bad the code of the App is not publically available, because I might have some ideas where it goes wrong in the code.

Greetings,
Unfoolishly

[klassm]

That sounds somehow familiar what ai encountered today (and several times before) - I only have one Unleashed connected to my D750. Out of nowhere the Unleashed suddenly starts to take pictures on its own - it looks like it is shooting in interval mode, while I didn't do anything on the Unleashed.

To get control over my camera back I have to kill the Unleashed Android app - when starting it up again it works just great again.

[Unfoolishly]

That sounds somehow familiar what I encountered today (and several times before) - I only have one Unleashed connected to my D750. Out of nowhere the Unleashed suddenly starts to take pictures on its own - it looks like it is shooting in interval mode, while I didn't do anything on the Unleashed.

To get control over my camera back I have to kill the Unleashed Android app - when starting it up again it works just great again.

Thanks for reporting this, so we know now a few things "certain":
1. This bug is probably within the Android App.
2. This bug can be reproduced by a single Unleashed, as well as several Unleasheds.
3. The user needs to kill the App.
4. The user needs to turn OFF the camera's (in order to stop it from going crazy!)

Greetings,
Unfoolishly

[Oliver]

Could you guys enable logging on your Unleashed apps and send us a log file after such an event happens again? Then our Android developers can look into it.

[Unfoolishly]

Could you guys enable logging on your Unleashed apps and send us a log file after such an event happens again? Then our Android developers can look into it.

I will try to think of it next time. Problem is that I wasn't expecting that at all! Too bad there is no "backwards logging" going back in time ;-)
Note that logging is only an option for Android users at this moment. iOS users do not have this option (yet).

Greetings,
Unfoolishly

[Oliver]

iOS users don't have these kind of problems! ;-)

we added logging to Android to cope with all the bugs related to the diversity of the Android ecosystem, and because we simply couldn't reproduce issues users were having, dispite testing on many, very different Android phones. This is simply never an issue with iOS. It's so homogenous, that all we need to care about is testing on the 3-4 screen sizes to make sure the layout doesn't get messed up, and maybe the 2-3 last iOS Versions we support, compared to the 6 Android versions, since there are still more or less recent phones being shipped with much older Android versions...

[klassm]

Hi Oliver,

today I encountered this issue again. I sent you the log file - hopefully you can see something in it.

Matthias

[Oliver]

Thanks! We'll have a look when we can.