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I have a Raspberry Pi 3 and a RPi 2 for testing these two LoRa modules. I'm having a couple issues... SEE BELOW FOR UPDATED ISSUE

  1. RPi screen freezes - Whenever I try to test the modules with example code in this library, the screens freeze on both of the Pis.
  2. RPi Broadcom SoC chip heats up - After the screen freezes, the board gets warmer than it is when the Pi is working fine, which I'm not sure if it's because a large process is going on in the background of if the LoRa is drawing more current after I end the process.
  3. RPi USB ports lose power - Sometimes this happens before the screen freezes, but a lot of times it's after. I also lose access to ssh/vnc at this point, probably because the WiFi/Ethernet modules lose power also.

What I've tried so far to remedy this:

  1. Replacing power supply - Number 3 above made me think the power supply was not enough, so I replaced it with a 5.2v 2.4A power supply and that did nothing. I also tried powering the LoRa modules with an external supply that was not linked to the Pi - that also did nothing.
  2. Replacing Pi - I had an extra Pi 3 on hand and I replaced it with the other Pi 3, to no avail.

I'm thinking the issue may be software related, because when I began testing, my Pi 2 had an older version of Raspbian and I had fewer to no issues.

Occasionally, things run fine on 1 out of the 2 Pis, although the other one still crashes (after the screen freezes, the LoRa continues transmitting for ~10 seconds).

I'm stuck, so any help will be appreciated.

UPDATE: I rolled back my version of Raspbian to 4.9.80 and it started working perfectly - no issues. However, I don't want to be running an old version of Raspbian on my project! Is there anything I can do to fix this?

Joshua Taylor
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1 Answers1

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You can find which OS you have with lsb_release -irc see About

You have probably run rpi-update

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install --reinstall raspberrypi-bootloader raspberrypi-kernel will put it back to the latest supported kernel/bootcode.

"In normal circumstances there is NEVER a need to run rpi-update as it always gets you to the leading edge firmware and kernel and because that may be a testing version it could leave your RPi unbootable". https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=916911#p916911 Even the rpi-update documentation now warns "Even on Raspbian you should only use this with a good reason. This gets you the latest bleeding edge kernel/firmware."

To get the latest Raspbian ALL you need to do is run

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

or

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

"dist-upgrade will replace deprecated packages, upgrade will just update things that are already installed."

Milliways
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