My first ever owned Raspberry Pi suddenly died yesterday. I had it working non-stop for like a month until last Friday (I had to hot unplug it). Since I did a lot of troubleshooting in the previous two days, I will try to summarize it here.
First thing first, these are the symptoms: PWR red led is on and stable. ACT led is very very dim (I almost can't see it due to the light coming from the PWR led). All the network-related LEDs are off. No output on HDMI nor in composite video port.
So, my troubleshooting so far (not by order):
- Maybe it was some issue with the SD card. Tried with a different one. Reformatted it with 3 or 4 different OSes. Tried the same card in another RPi (same specific version RPi 1 B) and all is working there. No luck.
- Checked the voltage between the TP1 and TP2 and it is within the required thresholds. Tried several different PSUs. All the symptoms remain.
- Checked the SD card pinout (VCC, VDD, CLK). All outputting values in the accepted range.
- Checked the SD_CARD_DET. Is low when the card is inserted and high when the SD card is removed. Nothing unexpected there.
- Checked the polyfuse (F3). The voltage difference between the two sides of the expected range (<0.1v). Just to be sure, I left RPi unplugged for 24h hours. No effect.
- Checked the components temperature and nothing is overheating at least.
- Checked the voltage values in the GPIO header. All is as expected.
- Tried to see the output of the serial port (GPIO Rx,Tx) when enabled in the bootcode.bin. Obtained no output.
Maybe I'm forgetting some step, but I did read all the sticky posts on the official RPi forums and did all the recommended checks.
TLDR: RPi 1 B died. All the Google-based and electronics troubleshooting did not help a bit. Maybe someone will come up with a new idea.