orange pi zero random boot freeze

[vasten]

Hi all,

 

So I have like 30 opi zeros using armbian image

 

I set one up with a basic system i need

 

I then made an image of its card and duplicated 30 times

 

It works great.. but...

 

they freeze on boot sometimes. and at installations it is not always easy to access the power to reset, plus with so many its a pain to identify which ones have failed to boot and go reset them

 

I am doing some tests in the office now

 

I have one set up which waits for a http hit, and when it get a hit it flips a power relay off for a couple seconds then on again.

Another one is connected to the power relay and sends an http hit on boot to the main one.

 

this way every time it boots successfully it gets rebooted by the main one.

 

a little light indicator indicates when the rebooting has stopped.

 

I have tried sever boards(all opi zeros)

 

The all have around 10% chance of not booting

 

why would it fail to boot only sometimes.

 

I have tried various power supplies.

 

I am now using a bench power supply.

 

I found that it fails to boot every time as son as i set the voltage below 4.8v, but is doing fine at 5.5v

 

but still no matter what I do it will fail to boot around 10% of the time.

 

I just cant accept this. I need the chance of booting to be at least 99%.

 

I have another install coming up with 40 of them. and going around every morning when they turn on the building power takes my co-workers an annoying amount of time.
 

FYI. cannot be overheating because the first boot comes after a night of no power. first boot in morning there are always several that didn't boot, sometimes quite a few.

More anoying is some are often installed where we cannot reach, and the power line is shared by several. so sometimes the only way to reboot 1 is to reboot 5, which means sometimes it can many tries before all boot successfully.

 

any ideas?

I tested the various SD cards.

The ones I normally use get rates as write is slow, but read is fine.

 

And have tries tones of power options, even battery packs. even with battery power still fails same percentage.

[guidol]

for identfying which zero doesnt came up you could insert

 echo "heartbeat" > /sys/class/leds/red_led/trigger

into the /etc/rc.local - before the "exit 0"

So when a zero doenst boot up it wont blink like a heatbeat on the red led.

Additionally you should setup a DHCP-Server which do assign the IP via MAC-address of the zeros eth0-Interface.

Then you could use a command like

nmap --open -sn 192.168.6.*

to have a look which IPs are active in the part of your network

 

As final comforable solution you could try to monitor all zero with NodeRed (running on node.js) and the NodeRed dashboard.

If you run a MQTT-Server on the NodeRed IP and every zero has to publish a Message after bootup to the MQTT-Server, then the NodeRed Dashboard could display the successful startup (and the DHCP-IP address if you didnt use s static-DHCP on the MAC-address)

 

The bootup problem didnt have to be the power problem.... it sounds that you are not shutting down the linux of the zeros...only poweroff.

If a zero is at this moment writing to the sd-card - then the card can have corrupted filesystem or can go defective
Then this zero wouldnt boot anymore with this card (if fsck couldnt repair the filesystem automatically)

 

[damies]

3 hours ago, guidol said:

Additionally you should setup a DHCP-Server which do assign the IP via MAC-address of the zeros eth0-Interface.

 

I have a 1/2 dozen Orange Pi Lite's and have encountered the same issue as vasten,  the only problem with this is that the MAC address is not fixed so if you upgrade with a newer image the mac address changes, so does the cpu serial number, in fact I haven't found any identifying number that remains the same on these devices (any suggestions?), which is a real pain cause I set my image to auto configure the host name based on the cpu serial number and then labeled them all and after an upgrade to the os they all changed names.

 

Hopefully the physical mac is constant and this works? unfortunately it doesn't help me cause the Orange Pi Lite has no ethernet.