Raspberry Pi doesn't stay powered up for long.

[steve_ancell]

I'm not having much luck with this Raspberry Pi thing...

I ordered a power supply, keyboard, mouse, SD card and leads kit only to find the SD card missing which the ebayer has now agreed to send me. I found a 2GB card laying about which has about 1/3 of extra space left after putting Wheezy on it so I thought I would temporarilly use that until my missing 8GB card arrives in the post.

I plugged it all in, connected it to my monitor and then powered up. First it got as far as a selection menu and before I can read what appears, the power is lost.

The power supply is a Sony-Ericson with the output printed as 5.0v at 850mA.

Please somebody tell me that I don't have to send the Raspberry Pi back to RS after waiting for it for 4 months.


[edit]And if that wasn't bad enough, I ordered a midnight blue Adafruit casing which came through the post with one of the clips broken [/edit]

[pluggy]

What do you mean by power is lost ? All the lights on the Pi go out ?

[steve_ancell]

A red PWR light stays on but the screen goes blank.

[pluggy]

What sort of monitor is it ? DVI, HDMI ?

How exactly did you flash the SD card and what do you mean by "which has about 1/3 of extra space left after putting Wheezy on it "

If you're not too technoically minded I'd hang on until the vendor sends you the SD card.

[johnbeetem]

One possible problem is that RasPi's 5V is drooping as the OS starts to work harder, which can cause a monitor to turn off. Sometime you can fix it by setting a "config_hdmi_boost" value in config.txt. See the Display section of the RasPi Troubleshooting Wiki: http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting#Display

I would also suggest looking through the Troubleshooting Power Problems section as well: http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting# ... r_problems

Your power supply sounds fine, but a lot of Micro USB cables have very thin conductors and the voltage drop across them can prevent RasPi from working reliably.

[steve_ancell]

What sort of monitor is it ? DVI, HDMI ?

How exactly did you flash the SD card and what do you mean by "which has about 1/3 of extra space left after putting Wheezy on it "

If you're not too technoically minded I'd hang on until the vendor sends you the SD card.

Yeah I'm quite technically minded, the monitor is DVI and I'm using a HDMI to DVI adaptor.

[steve_ancell]

One possible problem is that RasPi's 5V is drooping as the OS starts to work harder, which can cause a monitor to turn off. Sometime you can fix it by setting a "config_hdmi_boost" value in config.txt. See the Display section of the RasPi Troubleshooting Wiki: http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting#Display

I would also suggest looking through the Troubleshooting Power Problems section as well: http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting# ... r_problems

Your power supply sounds fine, but a lot of Micro USB cables have very thin conductors and the voltage drop across them can prevent RasPi from working reliably.

I did suspect something like that but was a bit puzzled why the ebayer is claiming that the adaptor in the kit was adequate for the job. I will have a go at that config file you suggested when I get some time later, thanks for the advice.

[steve_ancell]

Tried a friend's 5volt-1A Apple charger and it still trips out in less than a minute from cold, I get even less time after every power up after that.

I also got my new SD card, preloaded with Squeeze apparently, that one refuses to boot and flash the LED.

[steve_ancell]

Just been to Maplin and spent yet another £15 trying to get this thing working, that's three different power supplies and two SD cards been tried and it still keeps crashing. Really not impressed.

[obcd]

Can you measure the TP1 - TP2 voltage.
Another interesting voltage is the drop over the poly fuse on the bottom side of the pcb.
TP1 -TP2 should be at least 4.85V for a stable operation.
Maybe it's a bad board and that's why the ebayer sold it?

[steve_ancell]

Can you measure the TP1 - TP2 voltage.
Another interesting voltage is the drop over the poly fuse on the bottom side of the pcb.
TP1 -TP2 should be at least 4.85V for a stable operation.
Maybe it's a bad board and that's why the ebayer sold it?

I just purchased another power supply from Maplin, it is 5v at 2.1A and it still don't work.

[itimpi]

You could of course have a defective Pi!

It sounds as if it might have something like a micro-crack on the board that causes a connection to break when it gets warm? If this is the case you may have to RMA it to get a reliable Pi. Mine stay on for days/weeks at a time without issue.

[steve_ancell]

You could of course have a defective Pi!

It sounds as if it might have something like a micro-crack on the board that causes a connection to break when it gets warm? If this is the case you may have to RMA it to get a reliable Pi. Mine stay on for days/weeks at a time without issue.

I also say it's a faulty board, I'm 200 percent sure about that. I purchased it from RS, I just emailed them telling them about the fault, I just hope I don't get hit with another delivery charge, I already suspect that I have to also pay to send it back.

[liz]

Definitely send it back to them. You shouldn't be hit with another delivery charge, and they do have stock set aside to immediately replace defective units. Really sorry to hear about this - it's a VERY uncommon thing to happen (return rates are pleasingly low), and it really seems you've had pretty much the worst luck imaginable (I remember talking to you earlier about your delivery problems).

[steve_ancell]

Definitely send it back to them. You shouldn't be hit with another delivery charge, and they do have stock set aside to immediately replace defective units. Really sorry to hear about this - it's a VERY uncommon thing to happen (return rates are pleasingly low), and it really seems you've had pretty much the worst luck imaginable (I remember talking to you earlier about your delivery problems).

I was looking so forward to having a play with this RPi. I have emailed RS about the issue, I will keep you posted.

[Ginnick]

I have had a similar issue with 2 x 512mb Pi's received from RS. They would power up, then crash after anything from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.

Looking through the forum I found a few posts about similar problems, this led me to suspect fuse F3. One Pi had a resistance of 0.6 ohms over F3 and the other 0.8 ohms, but when powered up this increased to up to 250 ohms. (measured using a good multimeter and allowing for a 0.3 ohm 'background' reading)
The power on the supply side of F3 was a stable 5.1v, but over TP1 TP2 was dropping as low as 4.5v, this seemed to cuase the crash.
Leaving the Pi's unpowered for 48 hours had no effect on the readings.

This was without any usb ot Ethernet connected. I tried various OS images (Raspian and Arch) and also had no problem with my older 256mb Pi on the same hardware setup.

I have RMA'd both back to RS. I could be wrong about the cause of the fault, but it is curious that two (from the same batch?) should have the same fault. From memory the manufacturing date was week 36, 2012.

[mahjongg]

Yes, I also have suspected the OP had a bad polyfuse as the culprit rather than "micro cracks", from the moment I saw the topic. Polyfuses can get damaged by heat, so perhaps this one has been stuck in the solder oven for too long, or has been manhandled during reworking. Or it is simply a production fault of the Polyfuse manufacturer.

Definitely send it back, this simply shouldn't happen. This time there you shouldn't have to wait in the queue so you should be able to get a new one quite soon.

[steve_ancell]

After emailing RS Components yesterday, I still haven't had any reply from them.

They have my address, home phone and mobile number, my name and order number; surely it can't be that hard for them to contact me to help me get a replacement.

[mahjongg]

It seems to be symptomatic for RS to not reacting to any form of communication, (except perhaps telephoning). My guess is that with 10.000 customers clamoring for attention they just can't cope with it. But if you follow normal procedures they should have personell to take care of your guarantee returns.

[steve_ancell]

It seems to be symptomatic for RS to not reacting to any form of communication, (except perhaps telephoning). My guess is that with 10.000 customers clamoring for attention they just can't cope with it. But if you follow normal procedures they should have personell to take care of your guarantee returns.

It would help if I actually knew how to follow "normal procedures", they don't exactly make it easy especially for someone like me that has problems dealing with everyday things let alone this kind of stuff.

[steve_ancell]

I just found their phone number at the top of the invoice which is different to the number on the website, I will phone them if I don't get an email reply tomorrow.

[steve_ancell]

UPDATE! No success so far...

I just phoned RS and was told by an advisor to email them and be patient which I have already done, she said there is a bit of a backlog of emails in the Rapsberry Pi department.

I just hope the email address I sent to was the correct one, this is the one I contacted.

[email protected]

[steve_ancell]

I have also just sent an email to [email protected] and now wait patiently for a reply.

[steve_ancell]

Just got a reply from [email protected] and I apparently have to fill out a form and send it along with the RPi, I hope the next one isn't faulty because if that were to happen over and over again it will get rather expensive for me having to keep sending it back. I hope I don't have to wait ages for the replacement either.

[mahjongg]

I sympathise, I would think that any firm as large as RS would have clear and easy to use return instructions, and would answer the phone competently. Again, it seems they were never prepared for what happened to the demand for the PI, and greatly underestimated the task.

Just my private opinion, mind you.