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I2C was working great for over a month using an Adafruit Motor Hat, and an LSM303 accelerator/compass also on the interface passing through the Motor Hat and consuming 3v. As a side note, power-wise, two HC-SR04 sensors attached to GPIOs and 5v.

sudo i2cdetect -y 1 will show the devices, I'll run my robot control software and although the devices init, as soon as I send a command to the wheels my app will crash because the devices have disappeared and sudo i2cdetect -y 1 will not show the devices. That's happened a couple of times. The devices would eventually come back with no known action causing them to return despite my best efforts at process of elimination. Now I can't get them to come back.

There have been no updates to the OS.

As I make changes to diagnose, suggestions on where I should focus?

  • Wiring/Soldering
  • Power
  • Failed Motor Hat
  • Failed Pi

Steps taken without consistently providing a fix:

  • A reboot worked once to restore the connections but never again.
  • Enabled/disabled the I2C interface.
  • Resoldered SCL/SDA.
  • Tried disconnecting the LSM303
  • Turned the battery supplying the motors off/on
  • Disconnected the HC-SR04 sensors

I have another Pi but haven't tried swapping it in yet - I guess that is my next step even though that seems unlikely to fix it.

Thanks in advance.

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3
  • what is your question?
    – jsotola
    Commented Feb 3, 2019 at 20:46
  • Mid-way through the post, see the question has a question mark at the end: As I make changes to diagnose, suggestions on where I should focus?
    – Rob Reuss
    Commented Feb 3, 2019 at 21:33
  • Since you've attended to every other hardware possibility, except a different pi ... I'd say it is likely that the unlikely is not as unlikely as you think
    – Jaromanda X
    Commented Feb 3, 2019 at 22:29

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

Perhaps you have damaged the GPIO by feeding 5V from the sonar rangers back to the GPIO?

Try wiringPi's pintest utility or (my) pigpio's gpiotest to check the GPIO.

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2
  • It's possible I did because I was originally feeding 5V - subsequently I divided the voltage but perhaps it was too late. It turned out the Pi was the problem - swapped in another and it works fine. :( Thanks.
    – Rob Reuss
    Commented Feb 3, 2019 at 22:39
  • Accepting your answer because it was the likely cause.
    – Rob Reuss
    Commented Feb 3, 2019 at 22:40

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