Hey all,
I’ve been playing with my Phat Stack today and noticed a really weird odditiy… if I plug my Phat Beat into the stack, it kills the power to the raspberry pi… I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. It doesn’t matter how many other hats are on the stack, as soon as the phat beat goes on, the power dies. However if I plug the phat in directly to the pi 3, it works just fine…
I’m using a Raspberry pi 3 running Debian if that makes a difference
Sounds like there is a short between two pins on the Stack, best guess anyway. Have a good close up look at your soldering for any pads bridged by solder. Just a tiny little thin trail will mess things up. Assuming you soldered it. Even if you didn’t I look it over closely.
Well that was my assumption but they’re hammer head solderless pins, and it doesn’t make sense that it cuts the power when it’s plugged into the stack, but not when it’s plugged directly into the pi
It sounds like the issue is with the pHat Stack. If it was the pHat Beat it wouldn’t work when plugged in directly. Maybe its a short in the ribbon cable?
turns out I am an idiot and was wiring it backwards somehow… Doesn’t explain why when I plug in the Phat Beat now it randomly turns some of the LED’s on!
Ah, sounds like you plugged the ribbon cable in backwards. That’s one of the things to watch out for when using the Black Hat Hack3r and pHat Stack. You may have damaged it? I had one LED that always seemed to turn on. I swapped Pi’s and it was then fine. Plugged the original Pi back in and it was still fine? I never did figure out why it happened and it hasn’t happened again since.
found a new problem, whatever is plugged into the Phat 4 or Hat C port on the phatstack gets extremely hot. I bought a second stack and soldered it myself and it’s the same problem, I cannot for the life of me figure that one out. managed to burn my hand on a touch phat I had plugged in there.
update: no matter what I plug into bottom port gets insanely hot. I have also got a touch phat that I’ve soldered male pins into so that I could run it with a ribbon cable. When using the touch phat, no matter where on the stack, and no matter which ribbon cable I use, the little chip exposed on the board gets extremely hot and burnt my hand.
update again, I found a solution to all of my woes here
for a beginner like me this was a pain in the butt to do, but finally I have no over heating issues, and my VU meter works too now!
If your going male header on Pi < ribbon cable > male header on pHat, be very careful to get pin 1 connected to pin 1. Just having the white stripe on that end isn’t enough. You could end up with pin 1 connected to pin 2 and pin 2 to pin 1. Rotating the connector from pointing down to pointing up reverses the two rows of pins. It’s hard to explain but it will mess you up. For it to work correctly the male header on the pHat/Hat needs to be pointing up (on top), not down (on the bottom).