RasPi 3 not responding after some time

AstroBox Troubleshooting
#1

I’m trying to assemble a fully working solution for my arriving Prusa i3. OctoPrint, while really nice, simply does not have the ease of use I was looking for, so I decided to go with an AstroBox setup.

I have a RasPi3 lying around unused, so I’d like to use that. I do not need hotspot functionality so that’s fine. My network already has all the stuff set up for mDNS, so all I need is just a proper name for the box.

So I did the install, set it up through LAN, then pulled the plug. It worked fine for about an hour. After that, certain settings pages refused to load (simply white page without content), and after a few more hours, the box completely refuses to respond.

What’s happening?

#2

Probably the box doesn’t have a good WiFi connection. Do you have more than 1 WiFi access point? Were closer to one when you set it up and the moved to box to another location? Keep in mind that the WiFi in the Pi3 has a weaker antenna than your laptop or your phone so it might not get enough signal in places where other devices do.

#3

No, the unit was not moved and it is less than half a meter away from the only AP.

It is still connected, I can see on the router page that it renews the IP lease at every time it is supposed to, but the web UI simply refuses to return anything.

#4

Are you accessing it via its ip or .local name ?

#5

Tried both, and the device isn’t responding to either.

Could it be an issue that I do not have a printer connected to it yet?

#6

That shouldn’t affect. Can you check if haproxy is running?

sudo service haproxy status
#7

I do not think there’s SSH access, but let me read up on the documentation regarding that!

Though after a few restarts (hard, cable-pulling ones) it seems like it’s working now.

#8

Okay, I checked a few things.

It seems to happen when there’s a Windows client connected to the Pi via web interface that is put to sleep. If I don’t touch the web interface at all, it works fine. But as soon as something connects to it, in some time it dies.

Oh yes, I downloaded the latest ISO ( 10(4) ) and updated to 10(7) immediately after setup.

#9

I have the exact same issue. But actually I have this with a Pi 2 with wifi dongle and a Pi 3 with the built-in wifi.

Had the same thing with OctoPi on them. Actually switched to AstroPrint to get rid of these problems. I do like AstroPrint better, but I still lose my connections. Sometimes it comes back, but most of the times I end up rebooting the Pi. Pretty frustrating.

Friend of mine has the same problem and he’s on an ethernet cable, so no wifi there. Seems like the Pi can’t keep it’s network connection alive somehow…?

#10

I’d venture to say that it has to do with network setup, perhaps DHCP IP refresh rates or something. We have our boxes here connected with no problems. It’s certainly not a widespread issue across all users but it does happen to a segment of our users.

#11

It most likely is a network setup issue, however it is interesting that it happens, since I was using mostly default configurations. The only exception is that I set a fixed IP for the Pi so that I did not need its mDNS address to reach it.

Since I’m not in control of the main DHCP server at home, I set the fixed IP on the web interface, not sure if that matters.

#12

I tried both fixed and DHCP assigned IP addresses. No luck. Could very well be a network issue and not AstroPrint related… I’ll look further into it. Thanks.

(any suggestions would be greatly appreciated though!)

#13

Have you tried setting the address manually on the pi: https://astroprint.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207866186-Can-I-configure-the-Raspberry-Pi-network-myself-