pyportal.get_local_time() failure, NoneType

[brentru]

Calls to pyportal.get_local_time(secrets["timezone"]) fail with error:

  File "/lib/adafruit_portalbase/__init__.py", line 403, in get_local_time
  File "/lib/adafruit_portalbase/network.py", line 233, in get_local_time
  File "/lib/adafruit_portalbase/network.py", line 216, in get_strftime
  File "/lib/adafruit_portalbase/network.py", line 202, in get_strftime
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get'

Printing on L198 (https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_PortalBase/blob/main/adafruit_portalbase/network.py#L198):

            print(self._wifi)
            print(dir(self._wifi))
            print(self._wifi.requests)

Yields a None type for self._wifi.requests.

Getting time for timezone Etc/UTC
<WiFi object at 20003fe0>
['__class__', '__dict__', '__init__', '__module__', '__qualname__', 'connect', 'enabled', 'requests', 'esp', 'is_connected', 'neo_status', 'manager', 'neopix', '_manager']
None

Example code for where this occurs: https://learn.adafruit.com/pyportal-google-calendar-event-display/code-usage

[Neradoc]

So I just encountered that on the help channel on discord, and the quick solution with that demo was to remove:

print("Connecting to AP...")
while not esp.is_connected:
    try:
        esp.connect_AP(secrets["ssid"], secrets["password"])
    except RuntimeError as e:
        print("could not connect to AP, retrying: ", e)
        continue
print("Connected to", str(esp.ssid, "utf-8"), "\tRSSI:", esp.rssi)

and replace with this (a few lines lower)

pyportal.network.connect()

Here: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Learning_System_Guides/blob/5fd9a2e74dbfd6056136a79e2ca3ad645f1a7680/PyPortal_Google_Calendar/code.py#L71-L81

For me it's a problem with duplicating features when using a large device-name library. You can't do that with pins for example because they will be "already in use", and it shouldn't be done with the wifi connection either in these libraries. I would also advise to use requests = pyportal.network.requests or PortalBase.fetch() and similar, especially on the MagTag where you'll otherwise end up with multiple requests.Session (that's a different issue though).

A workaround to still allow connecting outside of the library would be to add something like this to PyPortal.connect(), where setup_when_connected() would basically be _wifi.connect() minus the connection part. Each board module based on PortalBase would need to be modified.

    while not self._wifi.is_connected:
        [...]
    # add:
    if not self.requests:
        self._wifi.setup_after_connection()
        self.requests = self._wifi.requests

After the while loop:

Adafruit_CircuitPython_PortalBase/adafruit_portalbase/network.py

Line 324 in d65f1ad

while not self._wifi.is_connected:

That's because that connection code that sets up requests is called if and only if the board is not currently connected to wifi, even when called from get_local_time().

[colejd]

I'm still seeing this error output on the latest version of the library.