Hi,
I purchased a Raspberry Pi board and accessories in June this year. I have had quite some difficulties with the board. It frequently freezes or spontaneously reboots. I have mounted adhesive heat sinks on the two main chips on the top side (CPU and LAN chips I think), but it did not seem to make much difference. I have been running Raspbian and another OS called MotionEyeOS. I have the same problems with both. I am coming to the view that there is a hardware problem with this board.
Regards,
Tony
Hi Tony,
Hmm, definitely unusual! My tip would be to isolate if this is software or hardware. To do that, get an image of your current microSD card (to avoid loosing any data etc), setup NOOBS completely fresh, and run some stress tests.
Let us know how you get on!
One suggestion from my experience with spontanaous reboots would be to ensure there’s plenty of current available from whatever power source you’re using. 
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Right on Clewsy, if I had a dollar for every time we’ve had someone reach out with a flaky Pi who were powering it via their TV USB port … I’d have about $9, still, it’s a common enough oversight!
Let us know how you get on, Tony
Thanks for the suggestions Graham and Clewsy.
First of all I am glad to find that we have a local support forum here.
I did not mention it earlier, but I have measured the power supply. I am using the plug pack that came with the kit. In addition I added a big supply bypass capacitor at the end of the cable to filter any large current spikes. I am quite certain that is not the problem.
The stability issues seem to be random. I have reinstalled the Raspbian OS a few times and it is not unusual that I get an error during the installation. I then have to reload the NOOBS image on the SD card (came with the kit) and occasionally it succeeds. Once with the OS running, I have done just some simple browsing (or something else) and it freezes. Removing the power at this point (is there an other option?) sometimes corrupts the SD card and I am back to square one again.
The MotionEyeOS is a dedicated application with a cut down OS. The version I have tried is supposed to be stable. I accept that this software could be an issue and therefore I have gone back to basics with Raspbian.
Anyway, I will try your diagnostics suggestions and let you know how it goes. Unfortunately work is in the way, so I won’t be able to progress until the weekend.
Thanks again for the suggestions!
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Hi Tony, yep unfortunately the SD card corruption can be unavoidable when removing power. You were saying that re formatting the card with NOOBS only sometimes works? Do you have another SD handy you could test it with?
Sam, I have tried a different SD card and it made little difference. I suspect it is the R Pi board, but I could be wrong. Is there a particular brand/type of SD card you recommend?
Hmm, sounds interesting, I can’t say I’ve tried every SD card, but according to the Raspberry Pi Foundation specs anything over class 4 should be fine (although I’d probably go with class 10 anyway as they are so cheap). When you say you’ve reinstalled Raspbian, have you done that inside NOOBS? I’d definitely try reformatting the card with NOOBS which you can do as explained in the How to Create a NOOBS SD Card tutorial.
Bear in mind that 3rd party apps for Kodi are notorious for stability issues right after new Kodi releases. Kodi itself is really (really!) stable.
