Pi wont stay on

[yokozuna]

Got my Pi about ten days ago. At first thought it was something I was doing wrong but now I'm not so sure. The Pi is not in a case but sitting out in open air. The power supply, which i tried two and two cables, is according to specs on the adafruit website. I have been doing my homework and trying to find a reason for the auto shutdown and have come up with nothing but inadequate power supply, improperly seated card, or corrupt OS. I have checked all of these.

I have Occidentalis installed on a 8GB micro Sandisk card that is on the supported card wiki. The mico card is in a low profile adapter from Adafruit. The batch number on the back of the board is FNXM121171526.

Not sure what else to try, look at or how else to troubleshoot this problem. My plan is to host a website on this card and I need to have confidence that it will stay running

G

[adafruit_support_rick]

How long will the Pi run before shutting down? Is there any console output at the time of the problem?

What other devices are attached to the Pi? Anything?

How did you test the power supply in order to rule it out as a problem? You tried different cables, but have you tried a different supply?

[yokozuna]

Yes i have tried a couple of different power supplies and cable combinations. All are rated 5v 1A switching. I am currently looking into where to put my meter to check voltages on the board.

The only thing that is connected to the Pi is a wifi dongle, chipset RTL8192cu.

The Pi ran for a couple hours yesterday while I installed packages. I went out to dinner so it may have been two hours before i noticed it was down. Today it seems to just last a few minutes. And its not really under any load, its just sitting there hehe. I only connected a monitor, keyboard and mouse at first to set it up for SSH. Now I only hook those up to figure out if it was dropping wifi or not on. It doesnt seem to be running when i plug it in. I now have it hooked up to watch it when it goes down. I dont know enough about Linux (why i got the Pi ) to know if there is a log file that I can look at to see if logs a reason for shutdown.

[adafruit_support_rick]

Try connecting the wifi dongle through a powered hub. These dongles sometimes require more juice than the Pi can supply. Usually, it's the dongle that ends up getting starved, but it sounds like your Pi may be losing the tug-of-war in this case.

If that doesn't help, check back here and we can start looking a little deeper.

[yokozuna]

i will try plugging the ethernet cable in and see if it shuts down again. i dont have a powered hub.
I find it hard to believe that the dongle could be the culprit. Its the only thing drawing any power, adafruit sells them for use with the pi.

reading up on voltages on the raspberrypi.org forums now. what is typical voltages across TP1 and TP2?

I just dont want to get stuck where I exhaust all avenues just to find something is wrong with board and I get hosed.

[adafruit_support_rick]

Don't worry about getting hosed. We're just trying to isolate the problem. We'll take care of it if it turns out to be the Pi itself.

This guy says that the minimum voltage required for reliable operation is 4.8V across TP1 and TP2

Also see here:
http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting# ... r_problems

Make sure your multimeter has a good battery, and check the multimeter against a known reference, if possible.

[yokozuna]

that is the site i was looking at for troubleshooting info.
I measured with my multi and got 4.8V also.

That wiki also says that a wifi dongle should be on a powered usb hub to back up what you wrote earlier.

My pi has been running now for hours without problems. The dongle is still in the usb port. I will test it a bit more tomorrow. I will probably just order a usb hub if that is a known issue. Hopefully that is the problem and can be fixed without any other hassles.

Thanks.

[adafruit_support_rick]

They also point out that the power requirements can fluctuate depending on which components are activated at any given time. For example, running a GUI or doing graphics processing increases power consumption because the GPU is activated (do you have screen-saver running?).

[dnorris011]

I had a similiar problem; the RasPi wouldn't stay on. I tried some other RasPi's in place of the problem child and they all worked fine. I returned it to the distributor. The replacement worked fine. My advice, don't knock your self out, some boards are simply flakey. I do hope they troubleshoot them instead of tossing them, but I think the latter is the case.