Lightning strike casaulty

[scottsh]

Ray, my house was hit by a lightning-induced power surge and my the OSPi was hurt (despite being on a surge protector.)

It looks like the OSPi main board is fine, but it is hard to tell. I can’t see any physical damage and the lights come on as expected. Are there any key things I should check – voltages to measure, etc?

The RPi is messed up, but I don’t know why yet. It won’t boot or come up in any way, whether connected to the OSPi or by using a USB power adapter. I have another RPi but I don’t want to fry it until I know if the OSPi board is good.

Thanks!
Scott

[Ray]

Hi Scott,

Really sorry to hear that.The key thing to check is the voltage on the +5V pin; use a multimeter to check the voltage between +5V and Ground (if you have OSPi 1.4, there is a +5V pin at the upper left corner of the PCB). If it’s between 4.9V and 5.1V, it should be fine.

You may also want to check the SD card — if the SD card is corrupted the RPi won’t boot. Re-burn the SD card image and see if that helps.

[scottsh]

Thanks Ray – I checked every voltage I could and nothing was amiss, so I put in my other Pi using the same SD card from the bad one and everything worked like a champ. I was back up and running in minutes.

I hate lightning. It can cause so many strange things. Several years ago, I had lightning strike a tree outside my home (in another state) and the lightning traveled into my house via the ground line taking out several things, including hopping over to the RG6 coax line and completely vaporizing the inside of a notch filter.

Scott

[rederikus]

Same here. Our house (Charlotte, NC) got a near miss two or three days ago. The flash and the noise were simultaneous. There was a pressure wave INSIDE the house. The power glitched and came back up. I have whole house surge protection but the OSPi lives in a Home Depot outdoor plastic case on the outside of the house. Its IP address vanished from my LAN. I just cut the power to it as it lives on its own breaker for a few seconds and it came back up again.

I think I was lucky this time.

[Author]

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