Xenon Flashes Can Make New Raspberry Pi 2 Freeze and Reboot

An anonymous reader writes Unfortunately for Raspberry Pi 2 owners who are trying to photograph their devices, ... the Raspberry Pi 2 has been found to be Xenon flash sensitive. Any camera with a Xenon flash aimed at the device is causing the device to freeze for a few seconds before rebooting. The forum thread about the bug is an interesting play-by-play of how the problem was narrowed down.

Comments

Re:Maybe not the power supply?

[itzly]

Hence, even though it looks like the power supply is failing, it could simply be the power supply is turning off due to overcurrent.

No. Covering the regulator chip solves the problem. That means that it is the culprit.

Re:Not Photosensitive

[Anonymous Coward]

A 100mW red laser pointer aimed at U16 also triggers it.
Unless you want to claim diode lasers now emit x-rays and low rise time EM pulses... it's light sensitive.
And inspecting U16 closely, it's no surprise. You're not looking at a plastic package but the laser marked underside of a bare die.

So put it in a case

[newsdee]

TFA found out precisely which chip it is (U16), covering it solves the problem.

Re:The new power supplies may be sensitve to EMP

[wolrahnaes]

That's because you're hearing the pulsed transmission of a TDMA radio technology.

D-AMPS (AT&T pre-Cingular), iDEN (Nextel), and any GSM 2G (up to EDGE) all use/used TDMA to share the frequency, so they're all potential causes of this.

These days you won't hear it much because D-AMPS and iDEN are both dead and most GSM phones will be attempting to connect on 3G UMTS (which uses CDMA) or 4G LTE (OFDMA).

DECT cordless phones are heavily derived from GSM so it's possible that they may be able to cause the same behavior, but due to their significantly reduced range requirements the power probably isn't there. I haven't heard it from my DECT phones.