Frustrating PiAware failure - power supply

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Just spent countless hours fixing my PiAware feeder. It has worked for years. Occassionally the SD card goes bad and I reburn a new one and am back online. That is what I thought again when I was notified that my site was no longer sending.

Long story short, the SD card was fine. The problem was the 5v power supply which would start booting OK and then would sometimes hang, sometimes reboot (with colored screen coming back every 10 seconds)… I went through numberous SD cards, tried burning older images,… It was very sneaky as measureing the voltage from the pins usually showed 5.1 volts. Not until I tried a bench supply (though the GPIO pins) did I get the thing to work.

Seems odd that a power supply would fail in this way (not a total failure, just lower voltage/amperage I guess). Glad to be back!

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Command to check RPI Low Voltage:

sudo dmesg --ctime | grep voltage

If above command does NOT give any output, then voltage is OK.

 

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Thanks, good to know. Wouldn’t have helped me since I couldn’t get my Pi to finish the boot sequence until I changed the power supply.

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Yes, you are right, but in most cases “power supply gone bad” is gradual and in start it will give issues like frequent failure of dump1090-fa or piaware, but the Pi will still boot. At this stage the low voltage cherck command is very useful.

Only when the disease of PSU increases and voltage becomes very bad, the Pi wont boot.

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