Hi
Just received some updates and went to rebuild a Raspberry Pi 4 with new, u-beaut M2 drive and Witty Pi4 L3V7
From the outset I should say the Rpi4 is installed in an ARGON ONE V2 RASPBERRY PI 4 CASE (and was previously a HomeAssistant (HAOS) setup)
Summary:
will not boot when power plug is attached to the Witty as per instructions
wittyPi.sh gets mega errors when run.
Start sequence
(checked EEPROM bootloader on Rpi4)
set the RPI to boot from USB first
installed the M2 drive in the Argon ‘extension’ case
flashed the Raspberry OS direct to the M2 drive by using ‘Raspberry Pi Imager’ whilst connecting it to my windows machine with a USB-A Male to Male connector.
removed the sd-card
attached the new M2 extension case onto the existing Rpi in the Argon case - at this point it is expected to be a new ‘virgin’ install
Booted it up - no worries. This is on the workbench with monitors and keyboard/case attached
enabled I2C
Powered it down
Attached the Witty Pi4 L3V7 board to the 40 pin GPIO plug using a stacking pin header. That is to the GPIO pins exposed on the top of the Argon case.
Attached the USB-C power cable to the socket on Whitty.
Powered it up.
It will not boot - seems to cycle. On Rpi (through the case) Red led, green led, flicker; rinse and repeat. The Lan connection never gets into gear (ie never gets to constant activity)
So…
unplugged
moved the USB-C power plug back to the RPI but left the Witty board attached
power it back up - came up
issued ic2detect -y 1 Super slow- like 5 seconds per address!!
tried to use the software. cd wittypi ./wittyPi.sh
to say the least it is ‘not happy Jan’
Running this was full of ‘Read Error’ amidst it writing its ‘menu’ to the terminal.
I cant include the text because this is no longet reproducable!
When I went to re-run this to get the output it now just says ‘Witty not connected’ - sure enough i2cdetect finds nothing.
OK I am lost. Any suggestions ?
Is there a reason the witty module would not work with an M2 installation or in an Argon case ?
Looks like you’ve been hard at work troubleshooting this one. From what I can tell, it looks like you have a boot loop occurring when it is running through the Wittypi. This could likely be due to the WittyPi not providing enough power to the Pi with all of the peripherals.
The Argon case may play a part in this, as it does have GPIO tracers back to where it plugs into the Pi, the loss along those tracers may just be enough to cause undervoltage issues and provide a bootloop.
Try and run the pi without the case and see if there are any issues, from what I can see that may be the next step in figuring out if there are any issues with the Wittypi itself or if it is an issue of the combination there.
Ok - I have done voltage tests as well.
The conclusion is that the Witty Pi4 L3V7 is incompatible with the Argon One V2 case.
It took some time because Argon doesn’t even bother to publish which pins it uses.
From investigations by others it looks like the Argon uses (apart from the i2c) Gpio4 pin-7 and TXD pin-8
So does the Witty! Neither device seems to make provision to change these.
It gets in a boot loop and between them they manage to drop the power rail for about 35ms every cycle.
I have not installed the software for either of these (yet) so its not software.
Given there is no power plugged into the case I would have thought it would keep out of the road.
I started this upgrade to solve the issues caused by incessant power failures - thus the Witty.
But now I am wedded to the M2 drive I added to the upgrade purchase.
Alas I am going to have to keep the drive and save up for a different power solution.
