Balnea Fin constantly resetting

balenaFin
1

I have a small fleet of ~15 Balena Fins (all developer kits). One of them currently is experiencing an issue where it is consistently coming online, then going offline, cycling about every 15 - 60 seconds. It is in developer mode and I have it connected via ethernet. Looking at the status LEDs, it seems as if the peripherals are losing power which seems to be what is causing the offline/online behavior.

The 3.3V and 5V LEDs are both illuminated, I am using the power supply provided with the Balena Fin Developer Kit, and have tried using another power supply from a different Fin dev kit just to make sure it was not a faulty power supply issue. This board has not experienced any power surges.

When the board goes offline, the only two LEDs that are on are the 3.3V and 5V red leds. TheLNK, SPD, FDX, and ON1/2/3 are all off. Sometimes the ACT LED comes back online and stays online, but that is not as consistent. The Fin is running BalenaOS 2.38.0+rev1(development) and is currently just running a fresh image, no app has been pushed to it. I have 3 other Fins with dev images and they are not experiencing this issue, as well as ~14 running production images that are also not experiencing this issue.

Any help or troubleshooting tips would be wecome! I am considering swapping Comput module from one of the boards that is working with the board that is having issues and seeing if the problem still exists. That could help isolate the cause.

3

Hi Scarson,

I think it will be helpful if we can rule out a faulty Compute Module. So I would try that before going any further.
Also, you mention peripherals, what kind of peripherals are you using? Did you try removing them to see if the issue persists?

4

I will give the compute module swap a try here in a minute.

As far as peripherals, I am not using anything other than Bluetooth, WiFi and Ethernet. When I say that it seems as though the peripherals are losing power I simply mean that the ON1/2/3 LEDs as well as the Ethernet, LNK, and SPD LEDs all turn off. I am not currently using the USB ports or header.

5

Great, thanks for the information. Please let us know how the compute module swap goes.

8

Swapping the compute module resulted in the same behavior, so it seems to me to be a problem related to the Fin itself not the compute module.

I also tried flashing a production image and I get the same behavior. Any other tips for troubleshooting the Fin hardware? Could I start an RMA proccess for the affected Fin?

9

Hey, thanks for trying that out. I just contacted the Fin engineers to see if they can help further troubleshooting.