Nanopi R4S - instability issues in use

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Can anyone suggest any troubleshooting approaches for my Nanopi R4S?

It was been somewhat unstable for months, occasionally just switching itself off for no reason. I don't mean a loss of connection on ethernet or anything, the actual unit powers off. Restarting services (such as Minidlna) seemed to particularly trigger it, as did, for my apparant readon adding new packages. So I decided it was time to upgrade to 23.05.4 in case the old version was the cause - but the process of upgrading made it much worse, with frequent switching off in the middle of the flash.

As I can’t have this apparent fragility, I switched back to my Linksys WRT3200ACM which was always rock solid. But in a while, I’m keen to investigate a bit further. Possibilities seem to include

  1. an issue with the OpenWRT software? But if so I’m surprised no-one else seems to have reported it. And it was present on both 23.05.3 and 23.05.4

  2. bad SD card? But I tried it with two different ones and it was the same

  3. inherent issues with reading and booting from an SD Card?

  4. temperature spike? The heatsink seems fine to the touch, and the unit is never under any great load

  5. Hardware issue?? I haven't contacted FriendlyElec yet, and they not egard OpenWRT as being unspported...

Like all the best bugs this is, I appreciate, vague and ill-definied. Can anyone give me some pointers as to how to troubleshoot these issues, I like the unit, but cannot have sudden switch-offs like this

2

Have you tried master to see if any of the changes since 23.05.x branched address shortcomings.

3

No I havent..maybe that is one test to run. I totally cant tell whether sthese issue are SW or HW related

4

There isn’t anything in the software that can make the hardware switch off.

Once loaded and booted the SD card isn’t used any more.

These problem almost always is a PSU fault or hardware fault of the PCB.

5

thank you - this was where my thoughts were going as no-one here was reporting similar issues. So step one is change the PSU and try again. If it continues to happen then back to FriendleyElec for a replacement

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6

I have 3 of them running, all rock solid and stable. My first thought was also the power supply. Try a different cable too, just to also rule it out.

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