Raspberry Pi RC14 Crashes

Hi people,

I’ve freshly downloaded the latest RC14 image, and burnt it to an SD card, everything launches nice and quickly and seems to work – however, as soon as I try to do anything other than run “Configure” the system seems to lock up without error message – I can move my mouse cursor around screen, but nothing responds to my clicking, I can’t seem to open a command prompt by hitting F12 either, and the only option left to me seems to be to pull the power on the Pi.

I’ve tested this on two different SD cards and two different Pi and every combination thereof (Both 512MB Model B)

Anyone got some hints? Or at least a way I can find a more meaningful error message?

Cheers

Hi Lee,

Does alt+break work?

And welcome to the forum!

Hi mike – thanks for the welcome!

Unfortunately the only keyboard I have handy right now lacks a break key.

Although with a bit of experimentation I found that if I leave everything alone for 5 or ten minutes it will start responding again (only, to lock up as soon as I try to do anything again however)

It sounds like the USB stack may be locking, I see it quite a lot. Try:

1. Putting the Keyboard/Mouse through a powered hub
2. Remove the Mouse to confirm it’s the Keyboard causing the problem
3. Use a different Keyboard
4. When the problem occurs unplug the Mouse and the Keyboard, then insert one and see if it works

Hi Jon

This actually sounds like it could be the cause – I was using a Microsoft combined wireless keyboard/mouse thing.

I’ll borrow a keyboard and mouse from work tomorrow and see how I get on.

Thanks! :-)

If you are using a USB charger as a power supply ie one where you plug in a usb cable, a different usb cable can help as may a different power supply.

This sounds not too dissimilar to this https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/4/topics/2383?page=3#posts-33881 – Jeffery was having a look at this in November but then life got in the way for me a bit and apart from a check-in to remove the nasty crash where the USB driver was complaining about running out of memory it left it in a state where the mouse moved OK but was un-clickable after pressing a button, then I had to give my keyboard to the lad for his Xbox so I’m back on a wired set now.

If the problem is a specific mouse/keyboard combination rather than a power supply issue you could try my version of the pi rom from here. It has a couple of fixes which may affect keyboard/mouse handling

Should have mentioned that I tried a handful of chargers and cables and got the same results :-)

If someone can’t point me in the right direction I’m more than happy/curious to do some further debugging and help out on this

Colin: I’ll also give your rom a shot too – might be a couple of days befor I get a chance to test any of this however :-)

Well, good news, I got it working by switching out to a different keyboard and mouse.

I have/had some issues with keyboard keys sticking or key pressing going missing – I minimised it by changing the refresh rate on the mouse (It’s one of these silly gaming mice that has switches under it) but there are still some minor issues with it.

Colin – I didn’t get a chance to try out your rom, is it likely that this would alleviate some of these keyboard issues? I can try it tonight and get back to you

Cheers

Lee

I think it’s most probable that your missing key presses are down to power supply. I had issues with key presses when I first got my pi, it turned out that it didn’t like the power supply dropping much below 5v – measured at the io pins. My power supply is the type where you plug in a USB lead and the lead was dropping the voltage to about 4.85 volts which wasn’t good. Changing the lead to a shorter one boosted the voltage to about 5v and it’s ok now.

Having said that there is an issue with the polling interval of certain devices in the raspberry pi USB Driver which is fixed by my rom.

Does this ROM require a specific version of RISC OS Pi? I’m currently on RC12 not RC14.

It should work with either. Just keep a copy of the rom you are using now if you want to try it and go back.