I think I know what happened.I have 3 RPi3B+'s that I have been using to drive my 3D printers using Octoprint. All 3 RPi's were purchased at nearly the same time and have been trouble free for years. Lately, Octoprint is reporting that all three are experiencing under-voltage. They didn't all start at the exact same time, but was spread out over only about a month or so. I replaced all 3 of the 2.5A power supplies with 3A units, and the warnings all disappeared. For a while. Then they came back, but now they are also starting to show over-heating. So this all begs the question - Do RPi3Bs have a limited lifespan?
If your Pies are under constant CPU load or are delivering a lot of 5V USB power to peripherals, the polyfuse on the Pi3 could be acting up.
On my Pi 3B that I used as a daily desktop PC for several years, it first worked fine, but started giving me low voltage warnings. The voltage coming from the power supply was a steady 5.05V under load, but it was around 4.8V on the GPIO pins. Turns out that the constantly high USB current had partially tripped the polyfuse.
The problem went away when I powered the Pi directly from the GPIO pins. I've also found that using an externally powered USB hub helps too.
Fortunately, the Pi4 and later models should not have this problem, as they no longer have polyfuses.
Statistics: Posted by Botspot — Sun Sep 29, 2024 12:32 am