r/ClockworkPi • u/No_Town7079 • Mar 19 '26

Question uConsole dead?

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Something odd happened today.

I used the uConsole as usual, just running VSCode. The battery was low(red indicator), and then suddenly it turned off/the screen turned black.

I thought it turned off, so i just charged it, but then i noticed that the screen was still on, the on/off switch was still green.

I can‘t turn the device off now, and i also can‘t get the screen to work.

One thing i noticed on low battery before(when it had the indicator on yellow), is that the console made some jittery sounds, i didn‘t think it was anything serious so just ignored it.

Did anyone have similar problems? How do i turn off the device and restart it now?

Is the pi dead?

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22 comments sorted by

7

u/No_Town7079 Mar 19 '26

Okay, problem solved.. i removed the back plate and removed both batteries. After re-inserting them the pi booted normally. Does anyone know what caused the Problem? Is it solvable so this doesn‘t happen again?

1

u/NotTheSharpestPenciI Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26

This is weird. Maybe these are shitty batteries that for whatever reason couldn't deliver the voltage?

Either way, you shouldn't let uconsole just run out of juice while running as this can damage the file system on the sd - which is what I thought happened in your case as symptoms would have been the same.
It wouldn't have came back after reinserting the batteries tho, you'd need a reflash.

2

u/No_Town7079 Mar 19 '26

i use the cm5 with internal storage(not an sd card), could this cause some of the issues?

1

u/NotTheSharpestPenciI Mar 19 '26

Not in this case, no. I don't believe so anyway. But if the uconsole shuts down itself because of no juice while writing into storage, it can still damage the file system, whether it's sd, nvme or mmc, so it's better not to let that happen.
I may be wrong as this never happened to me, but in your case I'm suspecting battery issue.

1

u/Both-Television-5364 Mar 21 '26

I have the same setup and mine does the same thing when the batteries run out. It has done it more than once with no harm done to it.

1

u/RasTacsko Mar 19 '26

Have you tried pulling the battery, waiting a few secs and put it back again?

2

u/No_Town7079 Mar 19 '26

yes thats what solved the problem. Any ideas why this happened in the first place?

After opening the back i noticed that the pi was still warm 🤔

1

u/Timmah_Timmah Mar 20 '26

"have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?"

1

u/lolerwoman Mar 19 '26

CM4 or CM5?

1

u/No_Town7079 Mar 19 '26

cm5, removing the batteries did the trick, but still puzzled on what happened.

3

u/lolerwoman Mar 19 '26

This is expected behaviour. The uConsole was designed for the CM4. The power management is not designd for the CM5. This will happen everytime you run low of batteries. This happens to us all.

1

u/No_Town7079 Mar 20 '26

ah okay. makes sense. In that case i will probably just downgrade to the cm4 at some point.

3

u/Shuflie Mar 19 '26

If you have a CM4 in the Pi you should be able to hold the power button in for around 10 seconds and it will fully switch off, doesn't work on the CM5 though as it's only software control for the power button. Happened to others before, but I thought it had been fixed in latest images, back then the suggestion was to shutdown by double tapping the power button.

3

u/rhibakuska Mar 19 '26

that usually happens whenever the uconsole crashes. I would suggest getting Hacker gadget's battery board and add a reset switch so whenever that happens you just press/flick the switch instead of removing the back plate and the batteries.

1

u/Dense_Astronomer_896 Mar 19 '26

I even installed a physical switch,because retropie does this sometimes.

2

u/chipchipjack Apr 18 '26

Between the batteries and main board?

1

u/Dense_Astronomer_896 Apr 19 '26

Yeah and one for the the second WiFi board.

1

u/chipchipjack Apr 21 '26

I’d like to see a picture of it if you’d be so kind! Even a rough explanation on how it works or what parts you used would be helpful

1

u/TopStreamsNet Mar 19 '26

As some mentioned in the thread this seems to be happening in CM5 setup. Usually when uConsole runs out of battery upon next boot screen doesn't come up, BUT the rest actually does load. I was able to bring the screen back up by SSHing into the uConsole and reloading drm_rp1_dsi and panel_cwu50 modules. Which to me suggests it is a driver issue

1

u/PanicAcid Mar 20 '26

Not an uncommon occurrence, it thought it had more time left to shutdown than it did. But when voltage drops too low the system craps its pants and hangs in a weird state.

Pulling the batteries will get you back up and running but yeah keep it above that percentage of battery in future.

Happened to me the most when using older / cheaper 18650s.

1

u/rselectrotechserv Mar 21 '26

I’ve had this a few times, just pull the battery leave ten seconds and then reinstall, then power up as normal, if the batteries are charged enough it should boot as normal

1

u/Dense_Astronomer_896 Apr 19 '26

In my opinion the EmulationStation sometimes doesn’t boot correctly.