Thunderborg no longer detected after dead batteries

Submitted by PetarV on Thu, 11/04/2021 - 15:25

Forums:

Hi,

After the batteries of our DiddyBorg died, and were replaced with new ones, the ThunderBorg is no longer recognized by the Raspberry pi.

Scanning the I2C bus via i2cdetect -y 1 returns an empty table.

I've tried the following without any success:

1. Changing different wiring harnesses (the 3 wire, jumper cables)
2. Making sure I2C is enabled in raspi-cofig
3. Re-ran the Thunderborg install script to make sure nothing was corrupted

I dont have another raspberry pi to test with and cant test if the pins are working because at the moment i can only power the raspberry by via the thunderborg.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

piborg's picture

piborg

Fri, 11/05/2021 - 15:30

That is rather odd, changing the batteries should not cause this kind of problem :(

Since the Raspberry Pi is being powered we know the ThunderBorg is still generating the 5V supply correctly and that the batteries are connected properly. This makes the I2C connection between the Raspberry Pi and the ThunderBorg the likely culprit.

Does the LED on the ThunderBorg still cycle through a series of colours when the batteries are initially connected? It should briefly show red, green, blue, then switch to battery level monitoring.

PetarV

Sat, 11/06/2021 - 11:20

Thanks for the reply! I managed to test with another raspberry pi board as well as a fresh installation of raspbian on another SD card and determined that the issue is software related, as I was able to detect the thunderborg.

I discovered that another team member implemented the use of some other pins for other hardware, shortly before the batteries died. This is what I now think was causing the i2c connection to not work properly.

Anyways the hardware is working as expected, thanks for the help.

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