Defective BrickPi+ brains

BrickPi
1

I bought 30 BrickPi+ kits, and so far 5 of them do not work. For all the brains, I connect the brain to ethernet via my laptop’s ethernet port. Then, I power the brain by connecting it to my laptop’s USB port. I open Google Chrome and type dex.local into the URL bar. The following happens for these brains:

— Brain #9) It will not load the VNC page/ dex.local. Only if we connect the brain to a TV with HDMI can we open Scratch and code.
— Brain # 12) It will not load the VNC page/ dex.local. I have not tried connecting it to a TV to see if it works through HDMI.
— Brain #13) The ethernet port lights do not light up, so it will not load dex.local or send and receive any data.
— Brain # 25) It will load dex.local and log me into the main page, but Scratch does not open. The Scratch’s command window will immediately close as soon as I click on the Scratch icon. I tried opening Scratch through the various other icons and programs in the desktop folder, but nothing has worked.
— Brain # 27) After about 10 minutes of refreshing, I could load dex.local with this brain, but as soon as I clicked on the VNC page, the brain would disconnect. This happened several times. Finally, it loaded the password page but disconnected again. After more refreshing, the brain finally loaded the password page and then the desktop.

2

Thank you for a detailled description of the issues you’re facing. I do have a couple of extra questions though. I hope you don’t mind.

  1. Does each BrickPi+ have its own SD card?
  2. Is each BrickPi+ matched to its own Raspberry Pi?
    What happened if you mix and match? Ie, take BrickPi #9 and use BrickPi #8’s SD card and Raspberry Pi?

Brain #13 may have a defective SD card. That’s another one I would try with a working SD card, to see if it fixes the issue or not (assuming you have dedicated SD cards for each brain )

Brain #25 seems to need to run a DI Update. You will need to enable Internet access on it in order to be able to run the update.

Thank you for your patience on this.
Cleo

3
  1. Yes
  2. Yes. We put brain #25’s SD card into brain #9 and then brain #9 was able to connect to dex.local. We will try mixing up other SD cards.
  3. We did run a DI Update on Brain #25, and there was no improvement.
4

One other thing you will need to be careful about is how you power the BrickPi. The proper way to power the BrickPi can be found here. You will want to be careful and use a 2A or greater wall wart power supply. Unfortunately a USB port on a computer can often only supply 500 mA, which can lead to connection problems, and corruption.

All four of the cards you can’t boot to might have been corrupted with the low power. You might want to try to re-flash the image using these directions here.