I received my PiSound today.
I’ve mounted it on a working Pi 3 with a fresh install of Raspbian. But it won’t boot up. When I power it up I see the multicoloured square on the screen, then blackness. After 3 seconds it repeats.
I remove the PiSound and the Pi works fine. Reattach it and it won’t boot.
The Pi by the way is a 3B v1.2.
Is my PiSound defective?
Well, I acquired another pi. A 3B+. The pisound board works fine with it. So it looks like my original pi is defective in some way, although it seems to work fine in every other respect.
Happy now working with my new pi and the pisound board.
Hi, you have tried to connect it with another charger with more amps?
I just had Pisound working fine, went to move to another room, unplugged it, moved to another room, plugged it in and solid red light, no flashing, won’t boot. Brought it back to monitor setup and didn’t get a boot screen either. Currently reflashing a spare SD card to see if that brings it back. Both the Pi 3 +B and Pisound arrived today, both brand new. Very frustrating that I just unplugged it and it won’t boot. Sure, I didn’t follow a proper shutdown, but I do that all the time in Linux and it always boots. Could have very well just been a local power outage.
Hi, does the Raspberry Pi boot without Pisound attached?
I was too lazy to take the Pisound case off and do all that. I got it booting again with a 2GB spare card that I flashed Raspbian Lite on. This told me it wasn’t fried which was such a relief, because I fried my first Pi a few days ago tinkering some of the GPIO pins trying to trigger a HALT. So then I did a proper shutdown now, waited for things to stop flashing and unplugged the usb. Then put the MODEP SD image back in and it booted fine with the display. Then I did a shutdown now on MODEP and went to my other room and it booted up fine.
I have no idea what happened but I’m afraid to unplug it now. I did try unplugging/plugging in about 5+ times the first time when MODEP wouldn’t boot with Pisound attached and waited about 5-10 times in between.
tldr; All is well now, but I had to boot with Raspbian Lite once to get MODEP working again.
Also, I am following this now. https://blokas.io/modep/docs/MODEP-and-Pisound/ and holding between 5 and 7 seconds to turn off MODEP properly. It is challenging to know how long to do it though and I think I’ll have to observe it a bit more with blink codes.
I also think I need to get a battery power supply for this so that and accidental unplug or power outage doesn’t put me in a non-bootable state. I plan on doing an open mic soon with it and might have to just unplug it without waiting so a battery backup will help prevent that.
Sounds like the SD card got corrupted that time. What has helped me get out of that state before (but not all the time) was simply inserting the SD card to a Windows PC, so it mounts it, and probably fixes something in the file system, then unmounting it again and putting it back to Raspberry Pi. I suspect Raspberry Pi itself does not do file system repair at boot time.
You may remap the ‘shutdown’ action of the button via sudo pisound-config. The blinks should happen at the rate of once per second, so it helps knowing how long it was held down to trigger the intended action, but you may as well remap it so that a double click of the button would shut down the system. See https://blokas.io/pisound/docs/the-button/ for more info.
That almost seems like the explanation, except for that doesn’t explain why I didn’t actually do anything to the MODEP 32 GB SD card other than take it out and put it back in to the Pi. If it happens again, I’ll try just taking it in and out and not trying the Raspbian Lite boot test with the 2GB card.
This happend again last night in my hotel room when I was unplugging my headphones and somehow the USB power came unplugged. Wouldn’t boot again, with Raspbian Lite or MODEP. I tried unplugging for 10 seconds or so and no go. I eventually just let it sit unplugged and jammed some acoustic and tried again and it booted with the flashing yellow lights.
Did you plug the sd card to something else while the Pi was not booting? Or they just started working again after some time?
I had unplugged the SD card in random variations of turning it off and on, but I never put the SD card into another device (e.g. laptop). It just booted after waiting a while with it unplugged. Some capacitor seems to be hanging on for quite a while maybe?
Hmm, we haven’t encountered issues like this before, where it would take so long for RPi to come back to life. 
After this occurs, try investigating the kernel logs from previous boots, see here:
If you spot anything interesting, let us know!
Hi people,
I can confirm this issue. It happens sometimes when I turn the raspi off (PI 3b+) and after 2 seconds I turn it on again.
But if you wait 1 minute or 2, the system boots up.
The is no SD card error, nor Rpi error. It happens only when Pisound is attached.
Hi, which end of the cable are you unplugging? If it’s on the power outlet side, it could be that the filter caps in the power supply unit don’t have enough time to discharge to fully turn the system off. If disconnecting on the micro USB side, it should be quicker.
Only plug the power supply back in once the red LED on Raspberry Pi goes dark to start the system again.
I usually unplug the board side, the micro USB port directly from the Pi. I’ll try the wall side to see if anything changes. I’m using an official Pi power supply too, fwiw.
Also, I tested with a stopwatch, and a 1 minute wait does not boot up but 2 minutes does.
I’ll check the logs.
Posted question here too https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/101748/pi-3-w-pisound-wont-turn-on-unless-wait-a-few-minutes
You should have a monitor connected, and see whether it is displaying anything and how far in the boot process it gets. For this, you should also remove the quiet argument from /boot/cmdline.txt, so that all the boot messages get printed.
Every few boots, the OS does fsck of the SD card, depending on the size of it, it may take a while, and that could cause some boots to take longer than others.
Ohhh, I think you are onto something with the not-every-boot-fsck!