Pi Zero W - Wireless Gives Up After A Few Minutes

  • I've got a pi zero w hooked up to an APEX television, with Krypton running on LibreELEC 8.01, having been installed by NOOBS 2.4.

    Following installation I added the YouTube add-on as my only video source, and set up my phone to use KORE as a controller.

    Upon boot up everything will work fine for 10-15 minutes. I'll have time to watch a couple YouTube videos, which will work perfectly... but upon playing the next video, it'll play for a few seconds and then I'll get a "YouTube Error. See Logs" in the corner, however, no matter what log level I view the logs at in the interface, there's no information in there about what went wrong with the YouTube playback. I can infer, however, by watching my "attached devices" screen in my router admin page that the fact that the pi zero w just disconnected from the wifi might have something to do with it. :D

    Back on the pi (using a USB keyboard since my KORE can't connect anymore) I can go into the network connection screen and it thinks it's still connected. Disconnecting the wifi network and re-connecting it does not work. I have to reboot the box, at which point everything will work fine for the first 10-15 minutes and then we start all over again.

    Has anybody else run into this? Is my pi just overheating?

    Thanks.

  • Firstly I would confirm it is not the youtube addon that is causing the problem.

    Boot your RPi and leave it running for an hour or two. If you can still connect then it sounds like the addon is the issue.

    To provide more information, enable debugging in Kodi, run youtube until it fails then provide the log file HOW TO:Provide Logfile - LibreELEC

    I doubt it is overheating, to check, run the addon and then with ssh run

    Code
    cputemp
  • Well, left it up and running this afternoon for about 3 hours, then this time I added Internet Archive for another source of Creative Commons video that isn't the YouTube plugin so I could test it under load, since it wasn't having any problems without load. CPU temp without load was 52C, however, and that seems a tad bit high to me for just running the OS.

    Anyway, but I couldn't get Internet Archive to work at all... again, error in the upper right corner that tells me to check the logs, I check the logs and absolutely nothing is in there about why IA plugin failed. So I fired up YouTube again and played a movie trailer... about 10 seconds before the end of the trailer the entire machine froze this time, not accepting input from any source, and kicked me out of the ssh session because the wifi dropped. It wasn't doing that before... the wifi would die but the box would stay living.

    So I can't get a log cause the whole box crashed. I'm going to try again and see if I can get a log out.

  • So... it's now been running overnight, and I still can't get the YouTube addon to fail... so yay for that... and the Internet Archive addon at least gives an error message when it dies...


    But still nothing that would explain why the wifi would crash or why the whole box would crash. I'll keep digging.

  • So it would seem that it's not LE but the add-ons that are causing the issue. I'd check on the relevant forum for each add-on.

    52 degrees seems to be about normal - especially if it is in a case, or a warm room. I don't have a Zero but do have an RPi1B+, so similar, and that was running around 50 degrees in a case at idle.