I have two Raspberry Pis in my attic. One is a Rpi2. The other is a Rpi3. The latter is connected to a FA antenna. The former to a homemade antenna. The homemade one doesn’t track as many planes as the FA one does, but it maxes out the CPU earlier. But it’s the Rpi3 that halts for some unknown reason occasionally. Is there something I can do to figure out why it’s halting? I’ve subscribed to a service that sends me an SMS if it detects down time. I have it set to check every 5 minutes. When this happens, I just pull the cable and plug it back in, and then it’s up and running again.
How is the pi3 powered? Quite often unexplained anomalies such as this are due to a failing power supply.
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Both are powered by the same extension cord.
If it shuts down due to heat, for example, will there be a log to that effect somewhere?
You can use something like graphs1090 (GitHub - wiedehopf/graphs1090: Graphs for readsb / dump1090-fa / dump1090 (based on dump1090-tools by mutability)) for example to track performance over time.
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Details should be recorded in syslog
Is the device really halting or simply losing the network connection?
I have a similar issue on my RPi 4 which i was not able to solve so far.
As a workaround i installed a script checking networking to the router once a minute. If it’s down, it performs a reboot.
Sometimes it last 2 days, sometimes it occurs 2-3x per day.
The graphs mentioned by finchang might help, but if the power supply is faulty, you will not find it there.
I had forgotten the RPi is powered by USB. It turns out each one was powered by a separate mains to USB transformer, and the one powering the one that kept failing was bad. It finally conked out for good during the electric storm last night. I was using a 2 amp adapter that came with an iPad. It’s now swapped out with another adapter.
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“Charger” type USB PSU’s are quite short lived when used as for continuous duty.
Unfortunately Pi’s can’t measure the supply voltage or problems like this would be identified much quicker.
2A may be low power capacity. More importantly is that USB Adapters (chargers) are generally set to have output voltage centered at 5.0V. Raspberry Pi external power supplies generally have greater current capability and have the output voltage centered at 5.1V to 5.25V. The higher voltage and greater power capability along with keeping cool with heat sink and/or fan, may fix the issue.
That’s solving a different problem.
What we are seeing here is a PSU, that was (regardless of claimed specs) adequate for months / years, but has gone bad.
The symptoms described are exactly what many of us have experienced and the fix is to bin the PSU and replace it. The quality of the replacement will determine how long it will last.
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