Low Voltage Warning leads to instability issues about astroberry-server

[rkaczorek]

What power supply do you use? Have you mounted radiators on CPU and GPU?

[MartinOST]

I am using a canakit power supply from this kit:

https://www.amazon.com/CanaKit-Raspberry-Complete-Starter-Kit/dp/B01C6Q2GSY

After the instability issues began, I unplugged all peripheral devices except mouse and keyboard.

The psu indicates 5V 2.5a but I do not have a meter to verify this.

[rkaczorek]

2.5A should be enough. I can't reproduce this issue on neither 3B nor 3B+.
The boot is new so 3B+ can be supported. What I would recommend is to check RPi's temperature with
/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp

The correlation of load and instability looks like there's a problem with CPU temperature on your board.
Also run stock raspbian OS for verification.

[MartinOST]

Thanks for the lead.

I did put the small passive coolers on both chips as recommended by Canakit.

I could also verify that Chrome seems to be the almost instant death of the Pi. I have run the stock Raspian for ~3hrs before installing Astroberry.

I'll measure the temps tonight and will report back!

[rkaczorek]

What happened after these 3 hrs with raspbian?

[MartinOST]

It was a new Pi I had purchased just for the purpose of installing AstroBerry. After playing with Raspian for a few hours, I decided to install AstroBerry. while playing with Raspian, I noticed no instability whatsoever.

[rkaczorek]

Thanks for the feedback. Let's check the temperature first. We'll try to find the solution.
I'm using it on two of my scopes both on 3B and 3B+ and have had no problems with stability at all.

[MartinOST]

Yeah, if this would be a more wide-spread issue, you'd see people complain a lot more. I think my problem is an isolated one. I will report back as soon as I can read the temps.

[MartinOST]

I did some test runs.

Idle temp is ~43C

Carte duCiel brings it up to ~48, same with Kstars.

Chrome brings it up to ~56C. However, pretty much consistently, Chrome will cause the Pi to reboot. Either upon starting of Chrome or when I navigate to a different web page.

I'd use the built in firefox but that crashes upon startup as well.

[rkaczorek]

It's a bad news then. The temperatures are by far normal.

Crashing firefox unfortunately is also normal - the one originally distributed with Ubuntu Mate has this problem, you can replace it manually with the one from Ubuntu:
wget http://ports.ubuntu.com/pool/main/f/firefox/firefox_52.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_armhf.deb sudo apt-get -y purge firefox sudo dpkg -i firefox_52.0.2+build1-0ubuntu0.12.04.1_armhf.deb sudo apt-mark hold firefox

The only thing that comes to my mind is to try other SD card. If it doesn't help it must be some kind of a hardware problem. On the other hand it does not appear on Raspbian... Very strange :-/

[MartinOST]

To add to the confusion ...

I just took the SD card and plugged it into another Pi that I had ordered. Brand new as well.

Boots up just fine without low voltage warning, runs Chromium, Kstars etc.

Could it be a defective Pi board?

[rkaczorek]

Yeah, it looks like. That's why I mentioned a hardware problem. I would try to return it to a supplier, as a defective product.