Pi palaver perplexes LOHAN Pixhawk pair

The planned brain surgery on our Vulture 2 spaceplane's Pixhawk autopilot got off to a shaky start yesterday as the aircraft's onboard Raspberry Pi decided it didn't much fancy booting up. Autopilot wrangler Linus Penzlien touched down in Spain on Sunday ahead of an intensive week of graft during which he'll be working with …

[Marcus Aurelius]

One Pi is never enough

Haven't you guys heard of redundant systems in safety critical design? :-)

You should have multiple slices of Pi voting on actions.

[DropBear]

Re: One Pi is never enough

Nononono - that's how UFOs work; multiple guidance systems will eventually tend to disagree on the course to take, and if you have many enough of them, there will always be one pulling in any given direction - you just end up hovering in one spot. If you want to move, you just disconnect the ones that vote against the direction you want to go in...

[Salts]

the fruity minicomputer...

I would use something a bit smaller & lighter than a minicomputer, this may help lighten the load http://dave.cheney.net/2014/01/23/avr11-simulating-minicomputers-on-microcontrollers :-)

[melt]

Re: the fruity minicomputer...

I've been playing with Dave's code. It looks like he eventually abandoned it because of how utterly slow it was when it had to call out to external memory.

[ISYS]

Does this mean you are getting closer to launching the feckin' thing?

[Lyndon Hills 1]

Remote working

Considering this is an IT publication, I'm amazed that Linus felt it necessary to travel all the way to Spain just to do some computer programming. You guys never heard of the internet?

Mind you the weather looks pleasant and the digs comfortable. Beer's cheap in Spain too.

[Lester Haines]

Re: Remote working

Rest assured, there's a bit more to it than just programming, so it's all hands on deck.

[Marcus Aurelius]

All hands on deck

Does that mean you've rented a yacht for your Spanish holiday as well?

[Lester Haines]

Re: All hands on deck

Yes. We're just waiting for the private jet to whisk us down to the coast.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: All hands on deck

I didn't think PARIS took passengers

Oooeeerrrrr missus!

[Steve Evans]

Pi on the floor

The usual thing that will cause a Pi to get upset in one location, but work fine on the bench (our favourite kind of bug) is the power supply.

The original Pi was very susceptible to a bad supply. If you're using a DC-DC convertor to feed the Pi, it'll need some good suppression or the Pi will get very upset. Same goes for cheap AC adapters.

I believe the new B+ is better in this respect, but I can't see which you have.

[Lester Haines]

Re: Pi on the floor

Model A in this case. It'd been working fine until we moved it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pi on the floor

If it was powering on but didn't boot and this turned out to be the SD connector pins, I would replace the Pi if your solution was to "heighten" them.

I've had this on a couple of Pis and while the fix works, they usually go again within a few weeks/moves. Not the kind of unpredictability LOHAN would like I think.

I'm going to try blobs of duct tape under the pins next to give them something to rest on, then I can at least say I fixed a Pi with duct tape.