RBPi Doesn't Boot With GPS GPIO Board Attached

[Nick Hibma]

This problem has been haunting us for quite some years, and we have always separate hardware to enable GPS manually only after boot. It -might- hit the keystroke to enter the BIOS, which is a big no-no for embedded devices in remote environments. You really want to make sure you don’t get bitten by that. There is usually no way to disable BIOS entry completely (Soekris BIOS, ALIX BIOS, CoreBoot BIOS).

Note: I am talking about BIOS, not even boot loader here…

Nick

> On 21 Jan 2015, at 23:25, Reza Nikoopour <rnikoopour at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Adrian,
> 
> It seems like you were right about the serial port taking in the GPS output
> as valid input.  I disabled the serial port login for Raspbian and I was
> able to boot into a shell with the GPS board attached.
> 
> Reza
> 
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 11:16 AM, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Does the GPS add-on speak to the raspberry PI serial console? If so,
>> it's likely outputting a whole lot of GPS data via serial, and the
>> boot loaders for both operating systems are interpreting that as valid
>> input.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -a
>> 
>> 
>> On 21 January 2015 at 09:57, Reza Nikoopour <rnikoopour at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> I'm currently building an NTP server using the following set up:
>>> 
>>> Raspberry Pi B+ <
>>> 
>> http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LPESRUK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
>>>> 
>>> Raspberry PI GPS Add-on <
>>> http://imall.iteadstudio.com/raspberry-pi-gps-add-on.html >
>>> FreeBSD 10.1 built with CrochetBSD
>>> 
>>> I was able to build an img with Crochet and get the Pi to boot into a
>>> shell.  However, whenever I booting the Pi with the GPS board attached it
>>> will not boot.
>>> 
>>> When I plug in the GPS Add-on into the GPIO connector, my Pi fails to
>> boot
>>> before starting the kernel.  It boots to the point where it says "Press
>>> enter to prevent auto boot" and then the letter 'L' shows up and starts
>>> erasing text from the screen.
>>> 
>>> I was initially using a 1.5A power supply.  It was suggested to me to try
>>> using a stronger power supply so I tried a 2.1A power supply, but that
>>> didn't work either.  Using the 2.1A power supply resulted in the same
>> boot
>>> problem described above.
>>> 
>>> Next I tried using Raspbian to boot the Pi, but a similar problem
>>> occurred.  The Pi boots without the GPS board attached.  When the GPS
>> board
>>> is attached, it boots kernel and when the screen to start Raspbian
>> Software
>>> Configuration then the following message prints to the screen
>> indefinitely:
>>> 
>>> SysRq : HELP : loglevel(0-9) reboot(b) crash(c) terminate-all-tasks(e)
>>> memory-full-oom-kill(f) kill-all-tasks(i) thaw-filesystem(j) sak(k)
>>> show-memory-usage(m) nice-all-RT-tasks(n) poweroff(o) show-registers(p)
>>> show-all-timers(q) unraw(r) sync(s) show-task-states(t) unmount(u)
>>> show-blocked-test(w)
>>> 
>>> Could I get some guidance with fixing this problem?
>>> 
>>> Thanks!
>>> Reza
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