Howto troubleshoot the pioneer FreedomBox ?

[Fred]

Dear FreedomBox Community,

I owned a Pioneer FreedomBox in last september, and I’m learning and using it these last weeks… For info, my box is behind a router, but it doesn’t matter here.

I’m not sure about the date, but I can’t anymore contact my box : it was disconnected a while from my home network, but connecting it again didn’t bring it back visible on the local network…
I would try to understand what is going on ; I tried to plug-out/plug-in again the Ethernet cable, without any success. I tried to use a direct network cable between my laptop and the FreedomBox, starting a DHCP server on my laptop, but I can’t see any IP traffic on it (using tcpdump to check it)…
I’ve [partially] read a doc I’ve found about the Lime2 card (A20-OLinuXino-LIME2-UM.pdf), and tried to use the USB-OTG plug on the FreedomBox to try to get a terminal access to the system, but plugging a USB cable in my laptop don’t do anything, as if the USB cable wasn’t connected to anything on the FreedomBox side…

I even tried (even if it’s not the best thing) to unplug/replug the power connector, but as my box has a Lipo power pack, I think it didn’t do anything

I didn’t tried yet to plug an HDMI cable (I don’t have such one at the moment), but does the FreedomBox use the HDMI output ?
Have you some advices on how to troubleshoot my box ? Should I open it, or is there a way to gain access to the system without opening it ?

Thanks for your help.

[njoseph]

The first things I would check is if the microSD card is plugged in properly and if the ethernet cable is not faulty.

Also, this sounds very similar to a problem I had a while ago

[SOLVED] FreedomBox disappeared from network list in router

I had a problem where my FreedomBox disappears from the router each time the network is disconnected and reconnected. Whenever there is a power outage of a few minutes (which might happen like once in a week at my place), the router is switched off but the Pioneer edition FreedomBox keeps running on battery power. Once the power comes back on, I found that the FreedomBox does not acquire an IP address from the router. A reboot of the FreedomBox device seems to fix this problem temporarily. I al…

You can attach a monitor via HDMI cable and a keyboard to the Pioneer FreedomBox device without opening the case. Login via the usual administrator user that you have on FreedomBox and try to troubleshoot the network connections or apt upgrades as mentioned in the above post.

You can also connect to another computer using a GPIO to USB cable. This is way more complicated than connecting to a monitor via HDMI. I only tried this on Rasberry Pis so far. Have to ask on Olimex forums on how to do this on a Lime 2.

[Fred]

Thanks for your help
I’ve plugged an USB keyboard an HDMI screen, and I was able to connect to my FreedomBox. I’ve struggled a bit with the qwerty configuration, and actually installed console-setup to manage my local keyboard layout.
The network interface eth0 was here but without IP address, and without a DHCP to get it, very strange… It was not a package upgrade problem (dpkg --configure -a didn’t do nothing). I don’t know well NetworkManager used here, its journal was only telling that the network failed some time ago… and restarting it (through « systemctl restart NetworkManager ») didn’t help, strange… Finally, I reboot the system, and the network was up again.
I’ll try when I have some time to reproduce the problem (perhaps caused by the Ethernet cable temporary unplugged).

[hanstux]

I had that problem twice, when my router rebooted. Could only help it by unplugging the Freedombox from the battery and powersupply to “reboot”. Which I know, is not wise, but it worked.