Our GoPiGo arrived yesterday (to the UK), so me and my son (aged 5) built it this afternoon. Everything is very well made and straightforward to assemble - we did it all from the video. Our only niggle is that our etched top piece of plastic doesn’t look as good as the one in the video - the video one has a really nice GoPiGo logo on it, ours doesn’t.
Anyway, all my raspberry pi power supplies are at work (school), so we powered-up using 8 new batteries and started to update and upgrade the GoPiGo image of Wheezy. However, after about 15 minutes it started repeatedly re-booting. We re-imaged the SD card (thinking it had corrupted), but the same started happening again, but even sooner than last time. A bit of googling and we found that this might be due to a poor power supply. I can only assume that the batteries are already flat after only 20 minutes. Has anybody else had this issue? Can any GoPiGo people confirm that the re-boot loop is a normal symptom of low batteries?
I just tried downloading the DI image too and am getting a similar boot loop issue, and that’s on mains power.
I’ve had more luck with modifying a standard Raspian image, but have found I cannot run all the python examples using that approach due to some missing libraries.
I’ve managed to solve the problem - I used a multi-meter to check each of the batteries. Bizarrely, two of them were totally flat, so swapped them and it’s been fine since.
As yours is connected to the mains, have you successfully used your power supply with the pi before? Maybe take it off the GoPiGo board and see if it boots normally. It’d be interesting to know how much the GoPiGo board draws.
Hi Matt and Richard,
We were easily able to get more than an hour of usage from 8AA batteries with the GoPiGo, the servo and the camera running together.
As Richard pointed out, it may indeed be a problem with one of the batteries. Do make sure that batteries are healthy and do measure their voltage with a multimeter.