USB and Ethernet ports suddenly stop working in my brand new Raspberry PI 3

If you have a voltage meter, I would check the voltage into the Pi. Even though you have a 5v (should be 5,2 for Pi 3) in, they sometimes vary as little as 4.85 or less because of how they work.

Clem

Thank you for your answer, Clen;

Honestly, I don't have a multimeter to check the voltage, but normally, if the issue is the low voltage, it wouldn't work at all. However, as I wrote everything went alright for a while but later, USB/Ethernet ports stopped suddenly; Am I right ?

Not true, if the current does not drop too. Check out R-Pi Troubleshooting - eLinux.org  which list good tips and even USB problems.

Clem

Hi Mohamed,

Do you have any heat sinks attached to the Pi? A lot of vendors seem to offer them for sticking on the chip closest to the USB ports, but it is unnecessary on that particular chip, and if the heatsink is oversized it could be accidentally shorting against the nearby capacitors. Basically, things like this should not be done; it could knock out both the USB and Ethernet if something like this occurred.

[Solved]

Thank you for your answers guys !

I just solved the issue. In fact, I've called the seller and the first question he asked is about the SD card size. I was using a 4GB SD card but he said that I should use at least 8 GB SD card. So, I bought a 16 GB SD card and everything is working well now !

With all the RPI v2 and V3 I have never yet had to put heatsinks on them, I run them for weeks on end and allow them to do their thing with default parameters and they work flawlessly

Even is in an enclosure

I just don't get why folks keep having issue with these, unless there pushing them beyond design parameters,

Am I missing something here ??????

Hi Peter,

As you say, ordinarily it is likely no heat sink is needed at all with the v2 and v3. However they both have co-processors called 'NEON' inside which can be used or left unused (Linux has no use for them by default as far as I am aware). The Pi 3 has four of them. They tend to run hot! (especially if all four are used).

The only problem is, some software does like to use them, so when they are used on the Pi 3, the power consumption rises and it gets to the point that the SoC starts slowing its clock down to cool off. That could be a problem to users.

The classic test seems to be 'cpuburn-a53' but a real-life example would be OpenCV, or some video encoding/decoding software will possibly do it too, as will some math-related libraries. With the HAL-CAM it became a real issue. I'm still not sure the solution I used solved it for anything except UK weather.. : (

The chip that shouldn't need it at all is the USB one, but a lot of vendors are selling these and there are components nearby that maybe could get shorted. To be honest ideally the Pi 3 shouldn't have any metal heat sink on it, simply because there is the antenna so close by. So in the end bwelsby and me ended up getting ceramic heat sinks, and cstanton used a diamond one! Another thing that seems to compound the issue when there is a lot of processing is that the RAM is on the underside which too will get hot, but it is right opposite the SoC : (

Also, Brian's findings showed that the heat sink on its own doesn't help much for the scenarios where a heat sink is needed, unless the board is not fully enclosed. If it is enclosed then from what I can tell a fan ends up being needed (or measures like mounting the heat sink outside, like HAL-CAM) if it is expected that NEON will be used intensively.

These are things we've discovered, but we can't know for sure what best practice should be, because the RPF have never explicitly said cooling considerations are needed, and their wording was vague in the MagPi issue that was supposed to address it, when the Pi 3 was released.

This (4Gb card is too small) is unlikely to have been the problem. I have run plenty of pi's with smaller SD cards. Its just that a 16Gb is so little more money than an 8Gb one, that buying 8Gb is not useful anymore.

Peter Oakes wrote:

 

With all the RPI v2 and V3 I have never yet had to put heatsinks on them, I run them for weeks on end and allow them to do their thing with default parameters and they work flawlessly

Even is in an enclosure

 

I just don't get why folks keep having issue with these, unless there pushing them beyond design parameters,

 

Am I missing something here ??????

Upon the initial release of the Raspberry Pi 3, it did not perform automatic throttling of the processor speed. This meant that under heavy load, meaning, when it had a lot of things to do, this increased its power usage and due to that, it had a lot of heat to dissipate. Because of the way the die, the structure of the processor and layout of it, is created, the temperature sensor is actually situated away from where the majority of the heat is generated, so what protection did exist, wasn't operating on correct values of what temperature it operated at.

Ultimately, after a few weeks, this was fixed in software. So the RPI v3 you're using will automatically throttle correctly. It has been accepted and admitted that the RPI v3 runs hot, very hot. If you're wanting to run it at its rated speed, you are going to need a heatsink because otherwise, it will automatically throttle and slow down, unless the environment is cool enough.

Raspberry Pi temperature and cooling testing Part 1 initial tests.

Raspberry Pi Operating Temperature Comparison (A+, B+, Zero, Pi 2, Pi 3)

If he is using Raspbian they have been saying for last two or three releases that 4 GB is too small. The image file for last Raspbian I downloaded

(2016-05-27-raspbian-jessie.zip) is 6 GB. I do not know if this is also true for Noobs.