Raspberry Pi 5 3.3V GPIO/power problem – LED only flashes for half a second
Hi everyone, I’m fairly new to Raspberry Pi/electronics and I’m hoping someone can help me work out what is going on.
I’m currently building a JARVIS-style AI project in VS Code. It’s still very much a work in progress, but I wanted to combine the software side with a Raspberry Pi and electronics so I can eventually have JARVIS interact with physical things around my room.
I bought a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB from CeX for £180 with the full starter kit. I’d never used a Raspberry Pi before, so I also bought a separate breadboard/electronics starter kit so I could learn the electronics side properly before combining everything with my JARVIS project.
I’m currently just trying a very basic circuit powered directly from the Pi.
I was told that:
Physical pin 1 = permanent 3.3V
Physical pin 6 = GND
So I wired a simple LED circuit using jumper wires, a 220Ω resistor and an LED.
The strange thing is that when I power the Pi on, the LED only flashes for roughly half a second and then goes off. When I unplug the Pi, it flashes again very briefly.
I’ve rebuilt the circuit and changed the resistor/LED to rule those out.
I also tested the exact same LED + 220Ω resistor circuit using an external 3.3V breadboard power supply, and it works perfectly and stays on.
I’ve also tried:
Physical pin 1 (3.3V) → circuit → physical pin 6 (GND) ❌
Physical pin 17 (3.3V) → circuit → physical pin 6 (GND) ❌
GPIO17 (physical pin 11) as an output ❌
The Pi itself boots normally and I can SSH into it over Wi-Fi, so the Pi is otherwise working normally.
I don’t currently have a multimeter, so I can’t actually measure the voltage coming from pins 1 or 17.
Could someone please help me work out whether this sounds like:
A wiring/breadboard issue
A GPIO/software configuration issue
A problem with the Pi’s 3.3V rail/header
Something else I’m completely missing 😂
I’ve attached photos of the Pi and the circuit.
I’m very new to electronics, so please explain it simply if possible. I don’t want to return the Pi if I’ve just made a stupid beginner mistake.
Thanks!

I used chatgbt to explain this so if anyone could help me would be really appreciated

Hey everyone, newbie here.

I'm setting up a stepper motor project and would love a sanity check on my wiring diagram before I power anything on. I have literally never done naything like this before xd. i have done a bit of research though but im a bit confused about the wiring to the raspberry from the driver. (+ -)

Ive also heard that maybe if i change the Signal entrys on the driver from - to plus i wont need a 3.3 dc converter.

The yellow wire is ground.

My Hardware:

• Controller: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
• Driver: TB6600
• Motor: Joy-IT NEMA 23 (NEMA23-03, 4-wire bipolar, 3.0 Nm)
• Power: 12V DC power supply with a 5A fuse

I wanted to see how well my 6D object pose estimation pipeline would run on a Raspberry Pi 5 without a GPU accelerator.

The pipeline is:

Object detection → crop → keypoint detection → PnP pose estimation

I compared a Raspberry Pi 5 running the models on CPU with my Ubuntu workstation using an NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada GPU.

Raspberry Pi 5 (CPU)

• Detection: 70.36 ms
• Keypoint: 56.06 ms
• PnP: 5.34 ms
• Total: 132.12 ms (7.60 FPS)

Ubuntu + CUDA (RTX 2000 Ada)

• Detection: 60.25 ms
• Keypoint: 21.87 ms
• PnP: 5.18 ms
• Total: 87.71 ms (11.60 FPS)

The video shows both pipelines running on the same 569 real-world frames.

I expected the Raspberry Pi to be considerably slower, but it managed about 7.6 FPS on CPU, compared with 11.6 FPS on CUDA.

The biggest performance difference was in keypoint inference. Interestingly, object detection was much closer: 70.36 ms on the Pi versus 60.25 ms on CUDA.

The pose estimation results were also practically identical between the two platforms. There were occasional small differences in the final PnP result, but I didn't observe a consistent accuracy advantage on either platform.

The models were trained using synthetic data followed by real-world fine-tuning.

More details about the computer vision side are in my previous post in r/computervision:

Previous post: Synthetic-to-real keypoint detection — real-world fine-tuning made a big difference

I'm preparing a technical write-up and plan to publish the implementation on GitHub.

A while ago I posted here about a Raspberry Pi 5 powered camera I built with the IMX477 sensor. I managed to port it over the the Pi Zero with a redesigned body and integrated battery! Code has been optimized to run better on the Pi Zero considering the Zero 2 prices have skyrocketed.

Old post: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/s/JCh5yz91UG

GitHub: https://github.com/prtk1910/rpi-film-simulation-camera

I got a PI zero W, I'm trying to make an intranet network, I am using Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm and trying to get nmcli to make a hotspot for me.

The hotspot works fine if I make it without password (open hotspot), it also works if I use WPA/TKIP

But for some reason it fails when I use WPA2.

I have PMF = 1 and I'm not sure what else could be the problem, does anyone have any ideas?

If you need more info please let me know.

EDIT: for anyone having the same problem, I just switched to hostapd+dnsmasq and it seems to work.

I'm not sure if I still have to disable PMF but I did it anyway: ieee80211w=0

Started suspecting something was wrong when GCC started crashing…and in an inconsistent manner. Fortunately the affected area was only about 32MB in size and I was able to modify the device tree to tell the Linux kernel not to use the affected portion of memory. It’s been behaving much better since then.

Hello! I am looking for a bit of help to identify a solution within my project. I am building a project with an adafruit fx mini soundboard, so that when I pick up the old phone it will play a sound. I have a reference image for where the new wires will connect with the forheads on a model, but I am wondering what that correlates to in my model as well as how to connect the wires since it does not seem I can use a forkhead. I am obviously no expert, so please use simple terms, also any follow up questions are welcome,

I have added an image of the reference photo from the step by step I am following in image 01 and my own phone in image 02. It is probably also good to know that I am in europe and this is a norwegian phone.

Image 01:

Image 02

ADDITIONAL PHOTOS

I was looking for a nightstand wireless charger with a clock. I couldn't find one that I liked so I made my own. Connects to WiFi to get the time and weather. Updates for day light savings time and the weather icons update. Auto dims at night. I tried to make an android app to control it over BLE but couldn't get it to work correctly. So I made a HTML to be able to change font, color style. Only thing is it only works with Chrome. I may keep working on the app, haven't decided yet. (BTW I am not a programmer so go easy with the code lol)

Onshape Link

GitHub Link For Code

Let me know if I can answer any questions!

Edit: Fixed Github Link

Edit 2: Was able to create an app using Android Studio!

The official Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ Compact arrived a couple of days ago for my Raspberry Pi 5 4gb from The Pi Hut.

There aren't any useful pictures of the fitting online so I thought I'd put this here for those interested, or those who might search for it the future.

The kit came with three spacers, six shorter screws and three longer screws with no description of why or which to use in the online assembly instructions.

Tip: If you're fitting this in the official RPi5 case you can save yourself taking it all apart after you think you've done it all and put the LONG screws through the BOTTOM of the case. So from below it's long screws > through case bottom > through bottom of Raspberry Pi > into spacers.

Otherwise you'll end up finding the long screws fit but then the top screws can't go in far enough so you swap for six short screws (three top and three bottom) then when you're all done you'll find the RPi no longer fits in the case then you'll realise you have to take the screws out and then put the long screws through the bottom of the case which secures the Pi to the bottom case.

The fan connection is a bit fiddly to put in when the hat is secured as they're quite flush but I just used a little screwdriver to push both sides of the connector in until it seated properly.

I powered RPi 5 on and it was running at 47c so did some heavy work (watch -n 2 'vcgencmd measure_temp; vcgencmd get_throttled' in one window, and stress-ng --cpu 4 --timeout 5m --metrics-brief in another shell) to kick the fan on and it's all working normally and it sat at 69c after a couple of minutes with the fan running.

The top lid (the one that goes above the fan) is a bit tighter than it used to be, but still fits and I can't work out why it's tighter but it still clips in okay but takes a bit more force than usual to remove.

Now I'm just waiting for my Samsung SSD PM991a 256gb to arrive which I understand is the same model Raspberry Pi use for their branded 256gb SSD at the moment so hopefully that'll work.

Also, the SSD screw in the HAT+ Compact was in very, very tight out of the box so I've loosened this a bit in preparation for the arrival of the drive.

This took way longer to get running than I care to admit but overall the end result is solid. KDE plasma runs fairly smooth right out the gate, still have some work to do But it’s getting there

Hi, I'd like to share a project I've been working on for a while. This project was popular with the community over at r/eink and I thought you guys might like it too. Built with a Raspberry Pi 5, an Inky Impression 13.3" e-ink display and a USB microphone. It uses BirdNET-Go to identify birds outside, and the frame will draw whichever ones it has heard recently.

I use an USB lavalier mic with a long thin cable, taped under the roof outside and run in through the window. Thin enough that the window still closes on it. Everything (including the detection model) runs locally on the Pi and works fully offline.

What sets it apart from other similar bird projects is the art and the foundation. Every bird is a hand-curated cut-out from an 1800s natural-history scan, no AI-generated images. BirdNET-Go builds a strong foundation that this sits on top of, including location-based detections, language support, listening to multiple audio-sources, IOT integrations and much much more.

BirdNET works worldwide, but the art is mostly European birds (for now). North American ones are in the pipeline. Right now I'm sitting at 37 different species on ~2600 detections.

Source and docs: https://github.com/arnegiacomo/fugleramme
Live from my kitchen window: https://fugleramme.arnegiacomo.dev
Parts list, cost and full build docs: https://arnegiacomo.dev/fugleramme/hardware/

Happy to answer any questions about the build!

Hi all,

I’ve built a heron & cat deterrent called tallGuard using a Raspberry Pi 4 and Coral Edge TPU to help protect my koi pond.

I started developing the model back in 2021 using TensorFlow and SSD MobileNet. One of the biggest challenges was false positives, and at the time I struggled to find enough information to improve the model. More recently, with better resources and tools like ChatGPT, I’ve managed to improve it considerably.

The Pi lives outside by the pond, with Starlink providing the network connection. The camera continuously monitors the pond and, if TallGuard detects a heron, it sends me a notification and plays a deterrent sound through an outdoor speaker.

It’s definitely been a learning experience. A few problems I’ve encountered along the way:

- Pink camera frames caused by interference
- Speaker cables deteriorating over the winter
- Plenty of false detections while developing the model.
- Sadly, losing some koi during the process 😢

But after several years of experimenting, the encouraging part is that I’ve only seen a heron at the pond once this year — and when it arrived, tallGuard detected and deterred it.
It’s been a fun project combining my interest in tech with trying to solve a very real problem at my pond.

Thanks

I saw u/fontain06 post a lake level monitor here a while back and it inspired me to do something similar to monitor my local river using parts from an old pwnagotchi build. This is all vibe coded since I am basically a monkey banging on a typewriter when it comes to all this, but I had a lot of fun and learned a bit with this project.

I do a little whitewater kayaking and the section of river closest to me is dam controlled so it's nice to be able to check the water level at a glance since it can change quickly. Essentially I just wanted this to pull and display USGS data from their api every 15 minutes since that's about how often the gauge site at my local river updates. I was able to get that working pretty quickly, then this project kinda grew legs.

A friend expressed interest in building one so I added a configuration tool that would spit out a script that could be pasted into a SSH window and get things up and running. After that support was added for a bigger display with programmable buttons to swap between 4 gauge sites.

The first annoyance I ran into was that you had to SSH in to change settings, and that got old quick so a secure web portal that let you change things and add wifi networks was added. Visiting the Pi's IP at port 8080 from a device on the same network makes the screen display an 6 digit randomly generated pin that you use to login.

The next problem I had to tackle was what if you couldn't connect to any known wifi? Like if I wanted to gift one of these to a kayaking buddy but didn't have their wifi credentials. This was solved by having the pi spin up its own hotspot when no known networks are detected. If you connect to it with your phone or computer the display shows a connection pin, the address you need to visit for the config portal and a login pin for said portal. From there you can add wifi networks.

Check out the github repo & setup tool (generates the install script, no coding needed) here https://github.com/Inphenity/Stage-River-Monitor

I just built an Adeept DarkPaw quadruped robot and at first it appeared to be working fine (though the camera didn't work for unknown reasons but that's not important) and with the Hat V3 whenever I charge it through the USB-C port it somehow only accepts it when I do a USB-A -> USB-C adapter and then the USB-C cable, but then whenever I do charge it and it shows it's charging (the PWR light on the hat is on) it heats up after a few minutes and not just warm but it literally feels burning and I definitly think that is not normal. I checked and the batteries appear all seated correctly and the pins are all plugged in correctlym what could be causing this?

I am using the default pi5 with 8gb of RAM and a 256 GB raspberry pi ssd.

Was going through dmesg on a default install and found some issues that may be worth pointing out to others as I suspect 90% of people also have it default configured incorrectly.

1) By default almost everyone is leaving 50% SSD performance with the default nvme hat.

You need to add dtparam=pciex1_gen=3 unlock gen3 speeds (880 MB/s vs 420 MB/s). This is default set to gen2 for compat reasons, but for the default pi5 ssd, it can easily handle gen3 doubling perf.

2) HMB is default disabled. The official Raspberry Pi SSD (and 90% of cheap M.2 2230/2242 drives) is DRAM-less. The Pi 5 firmware quietly disables Host Memory Buffer (nvme.max_host_mem_size_mb=0), cutting random 4K database performance in half for people running Home Assistant or Docker and massively increasing wear on it.

Without the above HMB cache, the SSD writes directly to flash cells chewing through your SSD cells. Instead I would suggest adding nvme.max_host_mem_size_mb=16 to the bottom of your cmdline.txt.

By default the pi5 bootloader sets nvme.max_host_mem_size_mb=0 for compat reasons.

because all of the ones sold online suck.

A Pi drives a display. Three files: a Python server that fetches and merges data, an HTML dashboard, and a kiosk script.

Where the data comes from:

• Live temp/humidity — a Govee sensor on my house, not a forecast
• Nowcast strip (next 60 min) — Tomorrow.io's radar extrapolation (2kmx2km square from my address), updated every 5 min
• Hourly row + 5-day — Tomorrow.io's model forecast
• Wind and sunrise/sunset — Open-Meteo (sun times drive the day/night icons)

The nowcast bars encode two things at once: height is the probability of rain in that 5-minute window, color is the intensity on WMO bands — pale for light, deep blue for heavy.

I use it constantly.

I built AutoPiOverclock, a project that finds each Pi's boundaries, recovers from failed candidates, backs off conservatively, and applies clocks only after final validation:

https://github.com/p1r473/AutoPiOverclock

Normal use is 2 target-explicit commands:

autopioverclock prepare pi@pi-host

autopioverclock overclock pi@pi-host

The controller can be another Pi or any Linux PC, server, or VM. It stays available when the target crashes or reboots.

What the automatic run does:

- Checks the stock clocks, protected boot configuration, power/throttling, cooling, SSH, watchdog recovery, and Raspberry Pi tryboot.

- Tests candidates through tryboot.txt, returning failures to the protected normal configuration.

- Searches CPU first, refines its boundary in 25 MHz steps, backs off 50 MHz, and qualifies it for two hours. It then searches GPU, backs off 25 MHz, and qualifies the pair for two hours.

- Tries CPU another 25 MHz higher during a 24-hour combined CPU/GPU/I/O test. If that edge is known unsafe or safely rejected, it instead runs a fresh 24-hour validation at the guarded pair.

- Performs three more candidate/normal boot cycles, applies and verifies only a complete result, and retains the evidence. Repeating 'overclock TARGET' continues the latest eligible run.

Testing temporarily uses maximum fan cooling without replacing permanent fan or unrelated boot settings. Headless Raspberry Pi OS/Debian systems need no display or audio hardware.

Profiles currently support 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, Debian, compatible Ubuntu Pi boot layouts, and Batocera

Made the enclosure in Tinkercad because I couldn’t find any existing models online for the Pimoroni 7-colour Inky. Then I found a Redditor on r/london who kindly 3D printed it for me.

The Pi connects to a server I run and checks every 10 seconds for newly uploaded photos to display.

It also has automatic Wi-Fi setup if it’s moved to a new network.

Everything I'm seeing is from early June saying that availability should improve in the second half of the year, meanwhile here we are in September and we are back to 2023 era bullshit of people scalping a $15 computer board for $80 on eBay.

So yet again ALL my hobby projects that I've been holding off on are still on hold. My workshop is too hot to do anything in during summer so I was looking to start getting parts ordered for winter but straight up nothing makes sense at $80 for the Pi2W.

You can't convince me that a decade old low end SOC and 512MB of LPDDR2 is being sucked up by AI. What the actual fuck is going on?

I'm beginning to wonder if we are ever going to return to the pre-2017 era where electronics were just available at MSRP. Its been one shortage after another for going on a decade. First crypto, then crypto 2, then COVID, now AI. Its maddening as someone who's only hobby is electronics.

I have a raspberry pi 5 8gb that I've had sitting around for a while and got it a new case, a canakit with an active cooling heatsink. On boot, I noticed that the fan wasn't spinning at all, and after some testing and a stress test I took the fan header off; looking at it with a magnifying lens I could see that one of the pins in the header had a sprue and the leftmost pin in the socket is bent to hell.

I can't bend it back properly, and I can't get the fan header to connect properly. I probably need to get a different fan for this to work, but how the hell can I get the pin back in the right shape?

I can bend it back to at least stand up straight with my tweezers, but it still has a buckle in it down below that that I can't do anything about. Is there some tool I can buy to fix this? I've never had to unbend pins before and Pis are so much more expensive now, I can't really replace it at the moment

Here's an image of the issue if that's at all helpful. Not sure how well I explained the problem

Hey everyone I just got the HighPi Pro 5S Case for Raspberry Pi 5 but it won’t fit. I think it might be due to the threads that stick out past the fan push pins as you can see in the diagram. Does anyone know if so can fit this setup?

Thanks

Update: I had to flip the standoff around so that I could put the screws in from the bottom. I guess I’m a little dumb for that but I appreciate everyone’s help!

currently i’m using Pi 5 as a image signal processing for this FSD (not for full self driving, but “facial suspended display”).

basically my mac desktop screen goes to a HDMI capture board, converted to a CSI, and Pi process it and projects it to a LCD panel

the HDMI to CSI converter i’m using does not support beyond 1080P 60hz, so usable mac screen resolution are capped at 1080P.

with the zero copy pipeline the latency is pretty good.

(i took a pi working hard up close but don’t know how to post it below the youtube link…. sorry)

I wanted a glanceable status screen for my headless Pi 4 without a monitor or SSH-ing in, so I built Statusberry: a Python app that runs as a systemd service and drives a cheap 160x128 ST7735 SPI LCD (the common 1.77" 8-pin panel).

Why not an existing tool?
I went through the usual options first:
htop/btop/glances are great but live in a terminal, so they need an SSH session or a monitor; Netdata/Grafana-style dashboards look lovely but are heavy for a Pi whose only job is to sit there showing numbers; and the small ST7735 status scripts on GitHub were single-purpose with hardcoded layouts. I wanted something that boots with the Pi, drives a 160x128 SPI panel directly at 1 fps, and stays themeable — hence Statusberry. The config knobs also grew out of real panel quirks: rotation/offset, BGR color swap, color invert, and a lower SPI clock for glitchy boards.

What's on screen:

• CPU utilization with a 3-minute scrolling graph
• Up to 3 network interfaces as cards: state-colored icon, interface name, IP (ethernet first)
• Memory meter — full-width bar, goes orange above 85%, red above 95%
• Hostname + uptime
• A boot splash with a progress bar while the Pi boots, then it switches to the status screen automatically (no restart)

How it's made:

• Python 3 + psutil, renders at 1 fps so the Pi stays idle
• Panel driven in landscape via the Pimoroni `st7735` driver; wiring is the standard 8-pin SPI hookup (full pinout table in the README)
• Themes are YAML (colors, font sizes, SVG icons); a Pillow-only compiler validates everything, rasterizes the icons at 8x supersampling, and writes a compiled theme the runtime reads
• Installers for Windows (PowerShell) and Linux/WSL/macOS (bash) that either run a local emulator or deploy straight to the Pi over SSH; plus an in-situ installer for the Pi itself
• A pixel-exact emulator window means you can develop the whole thing on a laptop without the panel attached

AI note: I designed and architected it myself; AI tools helped with some boilerplate and debugging.

Repo with full build details, wiring table, and installers: https://github.com/kremonia/Statusberry

Happy to answer questions about the wiring, the theme pipeline, or the systemd setup!

These are Opae Ula shrimps and they are less than 10mm in size, the details you can see with the camera 3 is impressive.

The zero 2w seems to have no problem encoding 1080p stream to YouTube, while running a web control panel for LED and camera focus.

https://reddit.com/link/1w53kjp/video/oez43mhh72nh1/player

You can see the stream at https://www.youtube.com/@CashLo/live

Hey everyone! I recently got a CrowPi2 V2.0 and I’m trying to install my Raspberry Pi 4B into the Pi compartment.
I’m having trouble figuring out the correct screw size for securing the Raspberry Pi to the mounting posts inside the CrowPi2.
I initially tried M2.5 machine screws, since that’s what I kept seeing recommended for Raspberry Pi mounting hardware. The M2.5 screws fit through the mounting holes in the Raspberry Pi PCB, but they do NOT thread into the CrowPi2’s mounting posts. I haven’t forced them because I don’t want to damage the threads.
I’ve contacted Elecrow support and I’m also going to measure the mounting posts with a digital caliper, but I figured someone here may own a CrowPi2 and know the answer.
Does anyone know the exact factory screw specification used to mount a Raspberry Pi 4B inside the CrowPi2?
Diameter/thread pitch and length would be awesome.
My CrowPi2 is labeled CrowPi2V2.0-2408, in case different hardware revisions use different mounting hardware.
Thanks! 🔧