Board randomly freezes at boot - black screen

[Paul Morrison]

My setup:
- A20-OLinuXino-MICRO (no NAND) with Debian 7 Wheezy microSD (Linux A20 3.4.67+ armv7l GNU/Linux)
- LCD-OLinuXino-4.3TS
- BATTERY-LIPO1400mAh
- MOD-IO2
- Ethernet connected
- Bluetooth USB pen connected
- Powered DC & Battery

The board boots when powered from DC and usually everything goes well, but the 10% of times it does not boot, it just shows an iluminated blackscreen (the one before "Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 A20 tty1; A20 login:" screen) and I am forced to disconnect power and battery to completely shutdown the board and start again.

The ethernet connected is not a problem anymore since I properly configured /etc/network/interfaces but the big problem is the board freezing at boot and much less frequently even after this.

The way I shutdown the board is when the DC power goes off, he software makes "shutdown -hP now". There are some posiblity that the board is not shutdown correctly and then shows this blackscreen at boot?

Many thanks for considering my request.

[JohnS]

I hope you mean DC?!

John

[Paul Morrison]

Sure DC.

[olimex]

can you attach USB-SERIAL cable to console and let us know the log when the board do not start correctly
my guess is weak power supply, when board boots there is peak in the consumption which the adapter may not handle well every time
please try another DC adapter with more power

[LubOlimex]

Also can you test with the two latest images for the board? It can be related to the older release somehow.

Wheezy: https://www.olimex.com/wiki/images/b/b4/A20_OLinuxino_Micro_debian_34_90_release_10.torrent

Jessie: https://www.olimex.com/wiki/images/7/78/A20_OLinuxino_Micro_debian_Jessie_34_103_2G_release_12.torrent

Best regards,
Lub/OLIMEX

[Paul Morrison]

After a few weeks of testings, the problem seems to be solved by that release of Wheezy, thanks a lot.

One thing I noticed with the new release is once the board is shutdown, only starts after take off and on the power, this is not a problem for me, but with the old release the board started immediately if power was up at the time of the shutdown.

[LubOlimex]

You can try to change the value of power_start parameter in the script, this would probably alter this behavior. How to edit the script might be found here: https://www.olimex.com/wiki/How_to_edit_board_configurations_and_definitions_in_the_official_Debian_Linux

Best regards,
Lub/OLIMEX