I am new to DexterOS, but not to Raspberry Pi. I have always understood that in Raspbian you should do “sudo halt” before removing power to the Pi, to avoid possible SD card filesystem corruption. I don’t see an equivalent in DexterOS. Is there such a shutdown operation, and if so what is it?
Thanks for the reply. AFAIK the problem happens anytime you are writing to a filesystem on a flash memory, like the SD card in the pi. If a write is ever interrupted by power failure, the filesystem may be left inconsistent, and in the worse case, segments or the entire card may become unwritable. You can minimize the chances by mostly using ramdisk and only writing to flash very infrequently, but if you ever write something, I think you’re exposed.
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Hello @beale! In older versions of DexterOS there was a shutdown button.
However, for all versions: The proper way to shutdown DexterOS is to press the power button on the GoPiGo3. You should press the button, the LED next to the button should start blinking red, and the whole system should shutdown.
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Thanks for the reply. I have not yet opened the GoPiGo3 package, as it is a gift and I wanted to let my daughter open it. Separately, I had downloaded the DexterOS image and was testing the SD card on a standalone RPi3 to check that it would boot up as expected (and it did- looks nice). Probably this use case was not forseen, but if it’s not writing anything to SD, then it should be safe to shutdown anyway. I’m really looking forward to seeing the robot in action. My daughter had fun controlling a virtual player with Scratch (eg. Minecraft Hour of Code) so it’s great there is an actual robot that can be programmed to move in a similar way.
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