Troubleshooting for Cosmic Pi V1.6
Cosmic Pi – Advanced Setup and Troubleshooting (V1.6)
What happens if your Cosmic Pi doesn’t work when you get it out of the box? Here are some common issues we’ve encountered during testing, if your issue isn’t in the list drop us a line!
Symptom: Nothing happens at all!
1) Check the power supply
Sometimes the power adapters don’t connect correctly with the barrel socket on the front of the box. In this case it’s normally enough to carefully unplug and re-plug it, checking that the power supply light comes on. You can power the unit with any 7V-12V DC power adapter if you are concerned about the one that was shipped with the device.
Symptom: No Wi-Fi network appears
1) Wait a few minutes
It can take 4-5 minutes for the WiFi network cosmic pi to be stable when you first power up the device, if it appears and disappears, it’s probably because your raspberry pi inside the box has been re-booting (normal on first power on).
2) If it still doesn’t appear
Check that you haven’t put your cosmic pi on top of a metal surface (this interferes with the Wi-Fi propagation – if you move it to a desk or table and try again the network should be visible).
If the Wi-Fi network still doesn’t appear (it’ll be in the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi range), the SD card has probably been corrupted (it can happen if the device is power cycled during boot-up). To fix this we’ll need to re-image the SD card as follows:
Unplug the device from the power and GPS cables.
Turn the device over and remove the two recessed screws that hold the top of the case shell in place.
With the device the right way up, remove the top case shell.
Carefully remove the microSD card from the Raspberry Pi Zero W which is secured to the floor of the bottom case shell.
Insert the microSD card into an adapter for a full size card (if required).
Download the Cosmic Pi V1.6 image from here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mwvej5bho11x9so/CosmicPiV16.zip?dl=0
Once the image is downloaded and unzipped, follow the instructions here to copy it to the SD card.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/
Replace the microSD card in the Raspberry Pi and close up the case.
Connect the GPS and power cables, it should boot and create the cosmic pi Wi-Fi hot spot as normal. Note that on the first boot, the device will re-start itself as the SD card partitions are sized to fill the full card, which may cause the network to disappear and then re-appear.
Hopefully it’s now going to detect some cosmic rays! If you are unsure about the performance of your device, you can also look at the test logs we recorded before shipping here: