Boots to retropie splash then shuts off

[r0ckarong]

I'm doing my preliminary hardware test before I start assembly and I get as far as the Retropie boot splash. I created the SD card correctly and can start the device. I see the rainbow screen from the PI when I switch to the HDMI input. Then I hold the power button until the Power LED turns green (it's blue while the batteries are connected). Then I see the Retropie splash screen and then the board immediately turns off.

Is there some location that logs the boot to SD card where I can debug this? Is this normal behavior?

Is there a step-by-step description of the (initial) boot? The stuff in the build guide doesn't tell me enough to figure out if its behaving normally.

[Flavor]

Do you have batteries installed? If you don’t, sometimes you could get this behavior.
Also see: https://www.freeplaytech.com/support/troubleshooting/

The blue light on the back will indicate charging, and it will turn green when it is fully charged. On the front, the green light indicates that the operating system is running, and it will turn to red if the battery is low.

[r0ckarong]

So the battery has to be charged before boot even though you have a power source connected? I don't understand this.

I will charge my batteries overnight so hopefully I get the fully charged light and then try again.

As I mentioned in the tweet it would probably make a lot of sense to have a table of the different LEDs on the board and the states that they should be in during certain tasks.

https://imgur.com/a/myThB

[jakejm79]

How many times have you tried booting. On the first boot it will shutdown and should (but IME doesn't always) reboot - it does this to resize the data partition to fill the rest of your mSD card.

[r0ckarong]

I tried booting many times. I still only ever get to the retropie splash screen and then it shuts off. I have now desoldered my battery pack and soldered a connector to a single battery. Will try again with this and then order new batteries.

[Flavor]

Did you go through the battery troubleshooting section of that URL I posted? It might help to determine whether the batteries are working properly or not. Let me know here or wherever if you are getting different LED colors than what it shows there in the troubleshooting.

[Flavor]

By the way, I agree that you’re right about having a table of the different colors.

Also, your battery shouldn’t need to be fully charged for it to work properly. It just needs to have any charge in it, and then it will work plugged in while charging.

If that is not the case, then I suspect there is a different problem. Did you get the battery from us?

[r0ckarong]

Apparently it had something to do with my batteries being soldered together. They seemed to not have charged properly. I left only one battery connected over night and then the green led on the back turned on. After that I was able to first do the resize boot and then actually boot into emulation station.

It would have helped to know that there are multiple LEDs on the back because the guide only speaks of an led that changes color from blue to green which is not the case.

Also a good thing to know would probably be how long these batteries need to charge. I was under the impression they were broken because even after three hours the green light wasn't on. It just took very long to charge one.

[Flavor]

How did you have them soldered together? Do you have a photo?

I know that I'm not great with getting the info out for some things. I keep thinking that I need to make a simple page that has some preliminary info like that. It could also be added to the build document.

[r0ckarong]

How did you have them soldered together?  Do you have a photo?

I know that I'm not great with getting the info out for some things.  I keep thinking that I need to make a simple page that has some preliminary info like that.  It could also be added to the build document.

I didn't do anything special.

EDIT: The only photos I have are the ones from when I did my test fit without the board. https://imgur.com/a/h5Dzp
You can't see the battery connections well though.


I simply put all the leads of the same color together. There would be three red wires 2 from the batteries and one from the JST connector. Same for black.

I taped the wires in place so they wouldn't move around, squished all the raw metal together as well as I could and then dumped bunch of solder on it until I had a shiny bead. Then I attached heatshrink tube around the new connections. The same way I attached the connectors to the batteries now.

I'm thinking maybe the circuits on the batteries prevented charging in that configuration because current/voltage was too low spread across both batteries?

After the one battery started working yesterday I hooked up the second one in a similar fashion and charged it until the green back led came on. Then I connected the second battery but now the green led is off again and only the blue one is on. I will observe what happened once I get back from work hopefully by then both batteries are charged and I can proceed.