Circuit Sword controller/Arduino/HUD/wifi issues

[DeathToPants]

I finally got around to putting together my Circuit Sword build over the weekend. If it matters, it was from the late-2018/early-2019 order. When I crack it back open next, I'll check the version. I want to say 1.3, but I'm not positive.

At first it seemed to be working pretty well. After a day or so, I started getting errors while playing games. Retroarch was throwing errors about the controller being disconnected. When this happened, the button-press HUD stopped working, but the battery and wifi indicators remained. After a few to thirty seconds, the controller functionality returned, but the HUD functionality never came back until I restarted. It seems to happen once the CPU temperature gets high-ish, but that could be coincidental.

A few times when I booted it up, the Arduino would flip its shit. The HUD screen would flash on and off, volume and screen brightness went up and down, wifi was turning on and off. I was able to drop down to the terminal while this was happening and re-flash the Arduino, which at least seemed to end that.

But now it's gotten to the point where the Arduino doesn't seem to be recognized at all. It boots up to this. I tried to reflash again, but no dice.

Wifi has been a problem, too. I'd get an the icon with an X through it on nearly every boot. Toggling it didn't help, and the wifi menu reported that there's no wifi hardware. For a while, if I turned the wifi off via the HUD, powered the system fully off, and turned it back on, wifi would work about 50% of the time. That value has dropped significantly, and now sometimes I get this: hardware is seen, but no networks found. I've tried an external USB module (the official Rpi one) a few times, which has worked fine when the internal didn't, but I haven't tried it lately.

I haven't tried a fresh install of the OS yet. I'll try that next to rule out software corruption.

After that, I'll open it back up and get some pictures of the inside, if necessary. There is a wad of kapton tape on the wifi module, the USB C jack, and pretty much everywhere else that looked like it could benefit.

Logs from shortly after the controller disconnected during a game:
/var/log/messages
/var/log/syslog

[kite]

Strange, could you please remove the CM3 module and clean the contacts on it, and inspect the module slot/holder and possibly blow some air in to it and re-seat it firmly but carefully.

Do you have joysticks?

It appears from the logs that when the hud/osd has the arduino disconnected that it doesn't properly recover. It acknowledges that bad data was returned and I suspect it gets itself a little unhappy..

One thing for sure to try, on a fresh SD (or another one, just to not lose your stuff) is to flash the latest image to the SD and see if that improves things.

[DeathToPants]

I have a single PSP-1000 connected to the first joystick plug. I believe I was playing an SNES game when the controller/Arduino got knocked offline in those logs, though, so I wasn't actively using it at the time.

Yeah, from an end-user perspective, the controller disconnects, stays disconnected for a period of time, then reconnects. But the other bits never come back. Even the power switch doesn't work properly. Gotta switch it off, then invoke a hard reset with the button.

I'll definitely reseat the CM and try a fresh OS when I get home. Thanks for your help so far.

[kite]

Yeah, from an end-user perspective, the controller disconnects, stays disconnected for a period of time, then reconnects. But the other bits never come back. Even the power switch doesn't work properly. Gotta switch it off, then invoke a hard reset with the button.

I'll definitely reseat the CM and try a fresh OS when I get home. Thanks for your help so far.

Cool, yeah the osd/hud does the powering off. What you can do instead is exit back to menu, press START->Shutdown and then slide the power switch off.. basically the same thing as what the osd/hud does

[DeathToPants]

Oops, that's right! I've done that a few times, but it slipped my mind. Better make a habit of that to avoid any further stresses on the poor SD card.

[DeathToPants]

Strange, could you please remove the CM3 module and clean the contacts on it, and inspect the module slot/holder and possibly blow some air in to it and re-seat it firmly but carefully.

Okay, opened it up, pulled the module and cleaned the contacts with alcohol and air. Didn't see any bent/missing/jumped pins or anything. Booted back up and ran a game. Same deal.

Next, I made sure I had the latest version of the software and wrote it to a different SD card. During the first boot, I saw this message. The boot continued after that, and the controller and everything seemed to work... except the wifi. Reboot, reboot, reboot, still nothing. Even with a correct wpa_supplicant.conf in place. Ended up plugging in the USB adapter, which worked fine. Dropped a game on it, ran it for a while and the same thing happened as before.

Closeup of the wifi chip.
Closeup of the module slot.
Dump of syslog.
Dump of messages.

[edit: Oh, and the board is V1.3C 20181023.]
[edit 2: Here's a fun one. Died shortly after powering on. No game launched, no CPU load or heat.]

[kite]

Cool thanks for all the debug, rather sporadic and random, what I think would be best is to send me an email and I'll give you the return details and pay for postage, and I'll debug/replace the main board