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I just got my Raspberry Pi and OpenSprinkler Pi board installed in my garage last week. It worked great for a few days then the Pi completely died. I took it off the sprinkler controller and tried to power it up with USB power, and never got any video or ACT light on the board.
The logs stop at 7:30-ish on 22 Aug. We had an electrical storm that evening. But since the pi is powered by the OSPi board, it seems a little odd that an electrical storm could have taken out the pi without damaging the sprinkler board. I had anothe pi around, and hooked it up and the sprinkler board seems fine.
So I have a few questions. They do last more than a week for most people, right? What are the odds I just got a defective pi versus lightning taking it out without (apparently) damaging the sprinkler controller? Cheap heatsinks wouldn’t have killed it, would they?
Are you sure it’s the RPi and not the SD card? I’ve had a couple of SD cards get corrupted, and this results in the power/RED light coming on, but the ACT/green light only comes on briefly. Changing out the SD card to a new one with a fresh copy of the OS fixed this in both cases. I had been using a couple of cheapo 8 GB SD cards, both of which failed. Some new SanDisk class 10 16 GB SD cards fixed that problem, though I really don’t need that much memory for the OSPi’s purposes.
@craigmw wrote:
Are you sure it’s the RPi and not the SD card?
Yep. I tried re-seating it in the old RPi, that had no effect. I tried the card from my other RPi (with wheezy) in the dead RPi. I read the sprinkler card in my reader on my computer with no problems, and the backup RPi is now running with that same card. It is a class 10 Sandisk 8 GB (I think).
@manithree: I suspect that RPi is more fragile to electric shocks or overvoltage damage since it has a lot more components, of which many are sensitive to high voltages. The OSPi board has a relatively small number of components and many of them (like the shift register) can take a lot of abuse.
I damaged my first RPi by simply connecting a digital output pin to GND. That fried the power circuit instantly 🙁
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