Shutdown and the battery

Pioneer Support
1

So I’ve been trying all kinds of stuff with my Pioneer FreedomBox-HSX, on a home network with a DMZ. The hardware is new, received 10 days ago.

I have to ‘shutdown’ my box as I configure and set it up in my environment, (in a wiring cabinet that is closed, only way to reboot anything in there is to trip the circuit breaker). So I shutdown the box first before I power cycle my stuff.

After I power up after a shutdown, the box does not completely recover. It responds to ping, but nothing else. I have to open the box and pull the battery connection before it will reboot and respond to web and ssh.

Now I have removed the battery connection, and I can shutdown, pull the power, reconnect, power up, and the box comes back with web and ssh working.

P.S. I got ruby on rails running on my box, there were a few gotchas, how would I share that info?

2

It seems that you’ve identified a problem with the integration of the battery and the FreedomBox software. I can’t say that I’ve experienced this issue on my Pioneer edition box, but it is worth knowing. But a couple things come to mind:

  1. Software: Just to confirm–are you running the FreedomBox OS as provided in the repository used for Olimex kits? Or are you running some other custom image?
  2. Buttons: Though the instructions don’t tell you this, there are three buttons on the Pioneer edition LIME2 board. The buttons were originally designed for an Android installation on the LIME2 (from Olimex’s documentation: “2 BUTTONS with ANDROID functionality + RESET button”). These buttons are in the bottom left in the picture below. One of these buttons (I believe the one furthest to the left) shuts down the device, regardless of whether or not the battery is plugged in. If you use a small object (like an Xacto knife or small screw driver) you can push it. You will know that it shut down the device if the green light from within the case turns off. Like I said, this shutdown will also shut down the battery. Instead of opening the case and unplugging the battery, try to push the button next time. Try this and let us know how it works.

back_buttons
back_buttons4032×2268 1.73 MB

Great to hear. You can share your work with our developers in the Development category of this forum. Or team can then decide what happens next, and whether or not a wiki page will be created for your use case.

3

Am using the official image directly from product page link.

I’ll test soon and report.

great info

1 Like
4

So I tried to press the left most button, it seemed weird and different than the other two, I opened the box and these three things fell out:
IMG_1873

5

Thanks for sharing this. As this is an issue with the hardware, your issue has been brought to the attention of Olimex.

6

@BradHodges Thanks for your patience. I’ve heard back from Olimex about your issue, and I can report a few things:

  1. Excessive force will break the button. It appears that happened in your case. I’m very sorry that you never received this warning.
  2. The three buttons are for RESET, BOOT, and POWER. They were originally designed to be used with Android operating system, so they are legacy features. The power button works in my experience, but I’ve asked my colleagues to look into it.
  3. The three buttons are not intended to be pushed regularly, which is why they are not easily pushed.
  4. We are looking into the functionality of the power button in FreedomBox.

Thanks for your patience, Brad.

1 Like
7

Hi
I’m facing similar issue in addition to Apache receiving SIGTERM and timing out after reboot (for which I’ve created a new thread)

However, can you please expound on the what “RESET, BOOT and POWER” mean and their differences?

  • RESET implied a reboot?
  • BOOT implied turn on?
  • POWER turn off?
8

@jvalleroy looked into this. Here is what he confirmed about the power button:

This is shown in journalctl when the button is pressed:

Jul 14 09:55:24 pioneer systemd-logind[295]: Power key pressed.
Jul 14 09:55:24 pioneer systemd-logind[295]: Powering Off...
Jul 14 09:55:24 pioneer systemd-logind[295]: System is powering down.

After that, the system does seems to be powered down (cannot access web interface and SSH).
If I press the button again, and then wait about 5 minutes, the system is back up.

It looks like the power button behaves as it should.