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Raspberry Pi 2 – XENON DEATH FLASH

Posted by Mike Redrobe | Posted in Technology | Posted on 08-02-2015

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Having just received a new Pi-2 , the updated version of Pi that’s quad core and 6x faster

I Was reading ths thread over on the official Pi forum:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=99042
where PeterO found taking a flash photo near the Pi caused it to crash.

With a bit of experimentation:

Took photo with Samsung Note2 – Pi 2 remains ok
Took photo with Samsung K Zoom – Pi 2 crashes.

Note the K Zoom has a Xenon flash, unlike most cameraphone’s LED flash.

Other models of Pi – A/B/A+/B+ are all immune from the “XENON DEATH FLASH”

I thought it might be the SoC (Pi’s main processor chip) but a huge blob of blu-tack over that wasn’t enough to save it crashing

but turning the Pi upside down, did protect it – so we knew it was optical, not EMP

A raspberry Pi engineer, JDB, then isolated it to U16, the power supply regulator and sure enough a small blob of blue tack on that chip fixed the issue:

Here’s a better view of the problem chip:

Comments (1)

Hello friend, i would like contact with you, i am doing a project with openCv and raspberry pi 2, do you have a e-mail? my email is eleazarherrera180989@gmail.com grettings.

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