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Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

jeffgeerling.com

11–20 of 97 posts

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#11

My PI is too cool. It freezes. I have playing with a PI Zero W over the last weeks. At first everything worked as expected. But now it developed some strange "hangings" I cannot explain. It kinda randomly freezes in time for a few minutes every now and then. Sometimes it takes several minutes to ssh into it. Sometimes, the terminal just freezes for several minutes. Neither top nor iostat seem to show any elevated act…

Is your hostname added to /etc/hosts?

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#12
post #10

My PI is too cool. It freezes. I have playing with a PI Zero W over the last weeks. At first everything worked as expected. But now it developed some strange "hangings" I cannot explain. It kinda randomly freezes in time for a few minutes every now and then. Sometimes it takes several minutes to ssh into it. Sometimes, the terminal just freezes for several minutes. Neither top nor iostat seem to show any elevated act…

Have you tried replacing the SD card with a fresh one with a fresh install and checking if this still occurs? I've had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out to be a dying SD card.

I will try that. At first I would like to see if I can find the problem. I would have thought that when the SD card is not responding, it would show up as "wa" in top and "%util" in iostat -x. But both are zero for the next output after a freeze.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#13

My PI is too cool. It freezes. I have playing with a PI Zero W over the last weeks. At first everything worked as expected. But now it developed some strange "hangings" I cannot explain. It kinda randomly freezes in time for a few minutes every now and then. Sometimes it takes several minutes to ssh into it. Sometimes, the terminal just freezes for several minutes. Neither top nor iostat seem to show any elevated act…

I had a similar problem. For me the reason was that I used a cheap charger with too less power.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#14
The flirc case is a giant heat capacitor, not a heat sink.

Notice that it has the only temperature curve where the temperature does not go back to baseline after the stress test. It needs a lot longer to get to equilibrium, and the final temperature is almost certainly hotter than what's shown on the graph.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#15
post #13

My PI is too cool. It freezes. I have playing with a PI Zero W over the last weeks. At first everything worked as expected. But now it developed some strange "hangings" I cannot explain. It kinda randomly freezes in time for a few minutes every now and then. Sometimes it takes several minutes to ssh into it. Sometimes, the terminal just freezes for several minutes. Neither top nor iostat seem to show any elevated act…

I had a similar problem. For me the reason was that I used a cheap charger with too less power.

Just exchanged the charger .. the hanging still occurs.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#16
post #14

The flirc case is a giant heat capacitor, not a heat sink. Notice that it has the only temperature curve where the temperature does not go back to baseline after the stress test. It needs a lot longer to get to equilibrium, and the final temperature is almost certainly hotter than what's shown on the graph.

exactly. For passive heat sinks, you need big surface areas. The FLIR case doesn’t do that and is arguably one of the worst options esp considering its price.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#17
post #14

The flirc case is a giant heat capacitor, not a heat sink. Notice that it has the only temperature curve where the temperature does not go back to baseline after the stress test. It needs a lot longer to get to equilibrium, and the final temperature is almost certainly hotter than what's shown on the graph.

I have been running one for a few months, and it does get consistently warm, but does not throttle the CPU (at least for my workloads). Will be setting up a second one as a “workstation” soon.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#19
post #14

The flirc case is a giant heat capacitor, not a heat sink. Notice that it has the only temperature curve where the temperature does not go back to baseline after the stress test. It needs a lot longer to get to equilibrium, and the final temperature is almost certainly hotter than what's shown on the graph.

There's still a good increase in surface area for convection it's definitely a heatsink. The graph does a poor job showing this but the start and stop idle time is 5 minutes. That's a good amount of time for temperature to settle.

Re: Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)

#20
post #18

Why do people use cases on a Pi? I’ve never ever used a case. My Pis are always out of the way and in a shelf somewhere, untouched until I make modifications to the setup, in which case the case is often coming off anyway.

There are "hardware project RPis" where you're always futzing with the gpio header, and then there are "appliance RPis" that live on top of the router they're connected to via a six inch Ethernet patch cable. A case is common for the appliances.
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