Ethernet port turned off after few minutes

Mine should be the second batch then since it's using HanRun HR901110A and the manufacturing date on the board says 1213.  I will have to find the HTC charger to try it out and will report back if that helps.

Mine should be the second batch then since it's using HanRun HR901110A and the manufacturing date on the board says 1213.  I will have to find the HTC charger to try it out and will report back if that helps.

If you want to experiment, another thing to try would be a different SD card. One thread on the Pi board here

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5900&p=78495#p78495

reports a temperature sensitivity (will not reboot when hot, but reboots OK if kept cool with a fan). This may occur with specific SD cards (not yet confirmed).  If you have a fan, could try running the fan over the Pi also. If that fixes the problem it would be very interesting to say the least.

So I tried HTC One X charger rated at 5V 1A but the Ethernet still shuts down after less than 5 minutes. I was able to SSH in before it went down though. I have sent RMA to element14 and they will be picking my unit up tomorrow for inspection.

Just in case it's relevant, at least one user "Zoop57" reports his Pi had reboot problems about 30 seconds after turn-on, went away when he used a different SD card. Another user "sorinm" suspects the temperature of some SD cards is an issue. http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5900

This makes me wonder: is there a general widespread issue with temperature-dependent behavior of SD cards? You'd think that would have been noticed by now since they are widely used in cameras, etc. What's different about the way they are used in the Pi? The system is booting from it, it is reading and writing relatively small files? Or the Pi's SD card interface has some marginal voltage or timing issues ? Are there other embedded Linux systems using SD cards that have these sorts of issues?

Followup: user "sorinm" confirms his problem is with the temperature of the SD card, and some SD cards do not show the problem at all:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5900&p=79008#p79008

[...] The problem with the temperature is from the SD card.

I tested 4 cards:

1) Kingston, 4 GB, class 4

2) Kingmax, 4 GB, class 2

3) Kingmax microSD in SDHC adaptor, 4 GB, class 4

4) Sandisk Ultra, 4 GB, class 4

All cards had a fresh copy of the latest debian image available. Same settings, etc etc.

I booted the systems, started LXDE, opened a terminal , run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and also ran rpi-update. This caused the Pi to be under heavy load.

1) The kingston card rebooted everytime no matter the load - SUCCES

2) The kingmax class 2 card rebooted everytime no matter the load - SUCCESS

3) The kingmax microsd card won`t reboot when it warms up - FAIL

4) The Sandisk Ultra won`t reboot when it warms up - FAIL

There seems to be a lot of posts about the Pi's not working.  Is this because of cheap parts being used or bad design.  what do you guys think?  I really like the Pi but there is a lot of issues being reported.

Most of the problems I've seen have been from the cheap parts that the user supplies (bad power supply, bad SD card). Or perhaps not necessarily "bad" but "incompatible with the R-Pi requirements" which you could argue is a design problem, in that it apparently is more picky about USB supply voltage and SD card timing(?) than most other devices that use them.  I've seen relatively few reports of boards being returned due to apparent failures of the hardware itself. Apparently there are 10k+ units out in the field now. If there was a 1% field failure rate (not too bad for first run of a brand-new board), that would be 100 units. I suspect we don't hear about most of the ones that are working fine.

I would like to know what fraction of the 10K or so units out there came up with no problems.  It does sound like there are lots of problems, but maybe that's just because there are lots of units.  Personally, I would not blame bad design.  However, RasPi does seem to be sensitive to power supply voltage and it may be that expecting any correctly-labeled USB power supply to work with any correctly-labeled micro USB cable was too optimistic.  Perhaps RasPi will need to ship with a qualified power supply and cable.  I don't have much personal experience with polyfuses but if RasPi's troubles with them are typical then I'm not impressed with them.

Along with quality of parts, another unknown is quality of manufacturing.  For example, are some of the heat-related issues people are reporting caused by poor solder joints?

it does seem that its picking in what card and power supply is used.

I work for a company that does consumer electronics. Some time ago we used some "PTC Resettable Fuses" (generic term for PolySwitch(tm), Polyfuse(tm), Multifuse(tm) etc) and I recall hearing they were one among a few troublesome components we had on the board. That design was before my time though; our current products use only the conventional type of non-resettable fuse. It might have been a specific vendor, or a design tolerance issue, I don't know.

"Since a PPTC device has an inherently higher resistance than a metallic fuse or circuit breaker at ambient temperature, it may be difficult or impossible to use in circuits that cannot tolerate significant reductions in operating voltage, forcing the engineer to choose the latter in a design."

...from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resettable_fuse

The Arduino 2009 contained a 500 mA polyfuse on the USB +5V input, and I haven't heard about many problems with that. Of course the Arduino itself only uses around 30 mA and I measure a fairly negligible 11.4 mV across its polyfuse.   http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardDuemilanove

Looks like the SD card problem may have just got a bit better now-  new firmware & kernel has apparently fixed some things:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=6093

John Beetem wrote:

 

However, RasPi does seem to be sensitive to power supply voltage and it may be that expecting any correctly-labeled USB power supply to work with any correctly-labeled micro USB cable was too optimistic.

In addition to that, I think there may be a rather important practical difference between "USB power supply" and "USB cellphone charger".

While they may be one and the same thing in the eyes of the USB spec, in practice the cellphone charger is made for the sole purpose of charging the cellphone with which it is bundled, and given the nature of the cellphone market, that charger will be made to the lowest cost possible.  It wouldn't surprise me at all to discover that it's only in-spec when charging the phone, and at no other current draw.

Morgaine.