Monthly Archives: April 2015

RPi SD Card corruption, a new kernel, device trees and a lesson learned

I recently fell victim to the perils of my own laziness.  Rather than gracefully shut down my Raspberry Pi in order to move it, I pulled the power cord.   I had done this dozens of times in the past with no ill-effects but today was my unlucky day.  The Pi did not come back!

Unfortunately, this snowballed from a simple file corruption issue into a full reinstall, which ended up using a different kernel version that broke my custom 1-wire bus setup.  Great.

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Fixing Random Electronics

Last Xmas I bought myself a quadcopter, and have had fun flying it.  Unfortunately after an “attack of dog” (a friend’s dog was trying to be helpful by retrieving the quad any time it landed) one of the motor wires broke.  Rejoining the wire was a snap, but the quad did not turn on.  It just gave a brief flash of its LED before switching off again.

I had a close look at the main board and found a generally shoddy soldering job – look for the upside down resistor!  One of the components was also missing (blacked out in the picture).  So how to identify and replace this mystery component?

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