[Solved] pimatic-echo crashes PS4

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Hi all,

other than me, my PS4 do not love pimatic as much as I do: When the pimatic-service runs on my RPi2, the games on my PS4 crash with a standard error code (ce-34878-0). What sounds ridiculous and absurd at a first glance took me hours to track down.

Here’s the whole story: Games with online connection are crashing on startup, but they are working fine when the PS4 was isolated from my home network (guest access on my router) or not connected to the network at all. Connecting the lan cable immediately produced the crash of the game (ce-34878-0). After shutting down one network component after the other, I came to the RPi2 with pimatic running on it. Further investigations on the RPi2 identified the pimatic-service (or node.js, I do not know wether this makes any difference) as the final reason for the crashes. I read somewhere that PS4 might have network problems, if somewhere in the network a torrent client with multiple connections is running. The error is reproducable on both my brandnew PS4pro and the old PS4 (re-initialized) with firmware 4.50.

I am pretty sure that it is the buggy Sony-PS4-firmware’s fault, but I wonder anyway whether someone has discovered this (or similar) behaviour. Maybe someone has an idea, how to limit/tighten node.js/pimatic connections on my RPi2 as an alternative to shutting down pimatec before starting a game on the PS4. Isolating the PS4 from the home network but with port-forwarding for PSN does not seem to possible with my Router (Fritz!Box).

I deploy pimatic with pimatic-hap, pimatic-echo and pimatic-homeduino on a RPi2 with node v4.8.0, which is working brilliantly.

Any thoughts, ideas or advises are highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

ArthurDent

I have a PS4 and have not seen any problems yet.Also running Pimatic with the plugins you mentioned and a few more.

Are you interacting with the PS4 with Pimatic in any way? Wakeup? Ping?

Not yet. During my internet researches I came across the PS4-waker, but I have not yet taken a closer look at it. Good to hear that it is working for you - if I find some time it might be an option to completely re-setup pimatic on my RPi…

@ArthurDent said in pimatic crashes PS4:

Any thoughts, ideas or advises are highly appreciated.

• Does your pimatic setup in some way send messages to your PS4, e.g. pinging the PS4 for preference, specific commands executed? Do you use pimatic-ps4waker?
• Do you have other stuff running on the Raspberry Pi which may do bad things?
• Did you also test what happens when you shutdown pimatic, e.g. sudo service pimatic stop? Does it also crashes in this case?

Btw, we also have a PS4 and I have never seen this issue

“sudo service pimatic stop” is sufficient to avoid the crashes (this is the absurd part of my problem). And no, there is no interaction between the PS4 and pimatic. I cannot fully exlude that something else might do bad things, I tried node.js v7, v6 at first and downgraded to v4 - maybe I messed things up. But pimatic is working so well…

And yes, there are other things running on the RPi2 as well but I have a spare SD Card left, maybe I try a naked setup with pimatic only and see, whether this avoids the crashes…

Really wired.

Which plugins exactly do you use, only the ones mentioned?

You could check the connections on the rasperry using netstat

netstat -ap

Thanks for your thoughts and assistance. I only use the plugins above plus “shell-execute”, nothing exotic. But your are invited to visit me and bring your PS4, to see wether this really is reproducable…

@ArthurDent said in pimatic crashes PS4:

to see wether this really is reproducable…

I did a quick research and it seems like quite a few users have problems with intermittent crashes. Some users suspected their router guilty, but in the end it was the PS4 system firmware and/or some game which f**ked up the system. Some users are suggesting “Rebuilding the database” helped in their case. If you google for the error code there are several articles suggesting it is a software bug. Seems like Sony is giving its customers a hard time on this one.

• Rebuild Database (as part of save mode) -
  https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/get-help/help-library/system—hardware/power—system-stability/safe-mode-on-playstation-4/
• Playstation Forum “Error code CE-34878-0” - http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/PS4-Support/Error-code-CE-34878-0/m-p/24193963#M68182

Believe it or not: pimatic-echo is the culprit.

I installed pimatic from scratch on a separate RPi3 running bare OSMC, which serves as a portable mediacenter. After installing the same plugins as on the RPi2 and using the same config file, I had the same issues: PS4 crashes when pimatic is running (regardless whether it runs on the original RPi2 or the new RPi3).

During the setup of pimatic on the RPi3, I started pimatic with the default empty config and the PS4 did NOT crash. After deactivating plugin by plugin, it became clear that it is pimatic-echo: If pimatic-echo is disabled, the PS4 does not crash. I suppose that pimatic-echo and my Echo Dot are producing heavy network traffic, which lets the PS4 struggle (maybe comparable to the torrent client somewhere in the same network which a PS4 does not seem to like according to what I read somewhere).

I guess I am stuck with Siri when it comes to my home automation… Does it make sense to contact pimatic-echo’s author?

Anyway, many thanks for your ideas and feedback!

CU, Arthur

Yes I guess it would make sense to ask the developer. Can you enable debug logs?

I think pimatic-echo emulates some kind of UPNP device (WEMO) so if the playstation searches for UPNP devices it might “request” something from pimatic and the answer might not be parsed properly and the PS4 crashes.

This are just some wild speculations.

I’m also using pimatic-echo with a ps4 slim on the same network without any problems so there still is hope for you

@thex said in pimatic-echo crashes PS4:

if the playstation searches for UPNP devices it might “request” something from pimatic and the answer might not be parsed properly and the PS4 crashes

Besides this it pimatic-echo also responds to discovery requests which might cause the issue.

https://github.com/michbeck100/pimatic-echo/issues/17

@mwittig: I just wanted to file an issue for michbeck100 @github - but you were too fast for me… Please let me know, if I can be of any help or provide any logs

@ArthurDent said in pimatic-echo crashes PS4:

but you were to fast for me…

Sorry, about that. To track the conversation you can click the subscribe button on the right hand side of the view below “Notifications” or simply leave a comment on the issue.

Okay, next update: The crash of the PS4 does not occur, when I start pimatic manually (so logging the error is not possible), only when pimatic is started with the init-script of pimatic https://pimatic.org/guide/getting-started/autostarting/

I am running OSMC (and not raspbian) on my Pies - that is the reason, why nobody else has this problem, right?

Switching the underlying OS from OSMC to raspbian finally solved the problem. Still strange, but many thanks for your thoughts and input on this!

@ArthurDent Then please set this thread to SOLVED. Thx

Would still be very interesting what causes this.

My guess would be one of the services which are used by the plugin is present in a different version on the OSMC distribution and causes some kind of “malformed” packets which crash the PS4

Unfortunately, PS4 just crashed again, this time with pimatic on raspbian. Strangely, I have not yet seen any crash when I start pimatic with “DEBUG=ssdp-server” - this currently is my workaround. Sorry to bother you again.

@ArthurDent without any further information like logs I can’t do anything. Sorry.

@ArthurDent what are your network settings on your PS4? There’s something like NAT type which might be interesting. I guess I could be a difference to my setup. Are you using wifi or wired connection?