The system has been running for about a week for testing together with a Tilt Hydrometer and Repeater. It has worked perfectly. Today I turned the system off and after a while tried to restart. Now the Pi will not start. No power to the Spark and no life at all. Red light and fan are working, so I assume it gets its power.
Where can I go from here?
To isolate possible causes, unplug everything except power and start again. Then check whether it’s accessible over SSH after startup.
If you attach a monitor before startup, it will show startup errors if it encounters any, and otherwise boot to terminal.
If the monitor isn’t showing anything, try taking out the SD card, and read it with a different machine. Windows isn’t really compatible with its file format, but it’ll let you know if the card itself is unrecognizable or broken.
The pi only gets to the rainbow.
I don’t have confidence in my SD card, will get a new one.
I hope my BrewBlox settings will be kept, they are on the Spark?
Block settings are kept, but block names, dashboards, non-block widgets, and history data are stored on the SD card.
It’s possible that any SD card corruption is limited to the OS part of the card, and the brewblox configuration and history data can be recovered.
You need a tool like https://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/ to access Pi data (formatted as ext-4) on Windows. The relevant data can be found in /home/pi/brewblox. If you can get that, you can put it back on your new SD card.
To do that, run the setup guide until just after the brewblox-ctl install command. Then replace the created brewblox directory with the one salvaged from your old SD card.
Then try running brewblox-ctl up inside it. If your data is not corrupted, everything will start as normal. If you get weird errors, we could have a look at what can be salvaged anyway, or you could remove the directory, and run brewblox-ctl install / setup to get a new system.
Hi again
I have got a new 32 GB card. Been through the RPi imager, plugged into the RPi and started up. I have a HDMI coupled monitor and see that it has started. I’ve dowloaded the terminal on my W10 pc.
I have a usb keyboard on the RPi and am able to log in
On fing I don’t see any response.
I’m not getting anywhere on the terminal.
What basic point have I missed here?
Have you configured Wifi settings?
Yes, when I ran the imager ctrl-shift-x and so on.
Selected WiFi, entered network name and password.
I installed the lite version of the OS. Now I don’t have the windows-like screen that helped me before.
sudo raspi-config still works for the lite version. You can find Wifi settings under “System Options”.
To check whether you’re currently connected, you can run ifconfig, and check whether wlan0 has an assigned IP address.
I rechecked, it turned out that I had set up for 5 GHz WiFi. Bad idea! I have contact now with the Terminal SSH. Fine!
I am now trying to transfer files from home/pi/brewblox on my old to my new card. It seems that diskinternals.com does not want to write to my SD card. It reads from /root but does not want to save to it.
Wild idea: can I use W10 file explorer an transfer on my pc? Somehow, I’m not convinced.
Looking forward to suggestions.
Diskinternals can be used for reading from old. For transferring to new I’d recommend filezilla.
https://brewblox-dev.netlify.app/dev/tutorials/remote_scripts.html#filezilla (ignore the rest of the page)