RPI5 Pironman5 max "can not open gpiochip" error after kernel upgrade

[CatsLover71]

Hardware : Rpi5 with Pironman5 Max box

Hello,
I upgraded the kernel from 1:6.12.93-1 to 1:6.12.96-1 on my Raspberry Pi 5.
Since that upgrade, the pironman5 service fail at start with error :

File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/lgpio.py", line 458, in _u2i
raise error(error_text(v))
lgpio.error: 'can not open gpiochip'

I tried to apply the solution in issue #58, the service starts, but the fan doesn't work at all. It's heat wave in my country and my Pi5 is used 24/7 as a server, I'm afraid it could suffer of this situation.

Thank you for any help.

[FamilieWeigand]

I can confirm this issue on my system.

Environment

• Hardware: Pironman 5 Max
• Board: Raspberry Pi 5
• OS: Debian 13 (Trixie)
• Kernel: 6.18.x
• Pironman: 1.2.26

After updating to a recent Raspberry Pi 5 kernel, both the vibration sensor and the GPIO fan initialization stopped working.

The OLED display continued to work correctly throughout all tests.

The logs showed:

Failed to initialize VibrationSwitch: gpiochip0 device not found
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'when_activated'

GPIO Fan init error: gpiochip0 device not found
GPIO Fan init failed, disable gpio_fan control

I verified that this is not a hardware issue.

The vibration sensor works correctly:

sudo gpiomon gpiochip15 26

which reports multiple rising and falling edges when tapping the case.

On my system, the RP1 GPIO controller is exposed as:

/dev/gpiochip15

instead of:

/dev/gpiochip0

Creating the following compatibility symlink before starting pironman5.service restores full functionality:

ln -s /dev/gpiochip15 /dev/gpiochip0

After restarting pironman5.service:

• VibrationSwitch initializes correctly.
• Tap-to-wake works again.
• GPIO fan initialization succeeds.

During startup, Pironman automatically creates:

/dev/gpiochip4 -> /dev/gpiochip0

The workaround has been verified across:

• Multiple pironman5.service restarts
• A full system reboot

After reboot:

• Tap-to-wake continues to work correctly.
• GPIO fan initialization succeeds.
• No more gpiochip0 device not found errors appear.

It appears that the current implementation expects the Raspberry Pi GPIO controller to be available as /dev/gpiochip0.

A more robust solution would be to detect the correct RP1 GPIO controller dynamically (for example by using gpiodetect) instead of assuming a fixed gpiochip number.

Hopefully this information helps identify the root cause.

If needed, I would be happy to provide additional logs or help test a future fix.

Thank you for your excellent work on the Pironman 5 software!