Pi overheating rapidly

[Rassilon216]

My raspberry pi is overheating extremely fast after startup. I notice that yesterday when I was trying to figure out the GPIO pin stuff, I looked and the pi was extremely hot and had shut down. Within half a minute of booting, the pi overheats to 140ºF and shuts down. Any ideas?

[ShiftPlusOne]

60ºC is not overheating. While it's above average, it is nowhere near 'hot', in electronics terms.

It may be that there is a manufacturing fault and the heat is stressing the solder joints and that's causing the reboot. It may also be that you have a bad power supply. There are many reasons why the pi is rebooting, but a 'normal' pi will operate quite happily at this temperature.

[drgeoff]

I cannot find anywhere in Rassilon216's post where he says the RPi is rebooting.

Which part is supposedly getting hot?

The GPIO pins are fairly vulnerable in the electrical sense. It is relatively easy to damage one of them and have that damage spread further into the SoC. Was the RPi working normally previously or is this a brand new RPi that was just been powered up for the first time?

[ShiftPlusOne]

s/reboot/halt

[Rassilon216]

the outer plastic of the larger black chip gets to 140º. That means the inside could be much much hotter. I suspect some part inside the chip that somehow regulates the heat has melted and now the pi just uncontrollably gets hotter after it is turned on. I am trying again now after it's being off for a day, and I will see if it works any better.


EDIT: Now the outer case of the chip heats to 160ºF, and the keyboard does not work, along with the mouse. The pi doesnt turn off, but it is completely unusable.

EDIT 2: and the pi was working well for the past year or so, this just happened suddenly just yesterday.

[ShiftPlusOne]

Hm, that's an odd one. Keep in mind that the cpu/gpu is under the RAM, so if the RAM is that hot, the cpu is hell of a lot toastier. Assuming you are describing the situation accurately, I am not sure if there's anything you can do to fix it, so I hope that it's still within the warranty period (12 months).

[Thaddy]

A very late reply, but:

160 F is only ~72 C. The shutdown temperature is documented as being 85 C and well below actual hardware fail/damage, thus 185 F. So this is all within specification and it is correct that the Pi doesn't shut down. Seems something different. It is very difficult to reach 85 C even with 1000Mhz overclock settings and 24/7 operation. Maybe ripple in the mains/PSU. This can also be the cause of the relatively high temperature.
In the case of mains ripple, use a mains extension block with peak protection and mains filtering. This may very well also cleanup cheap power supplies.

[ShiftPlusOne]

A very late reply, but:

160 F is only ~72 C. The shutdown temperature is documented as being 85 C and well below actual hardware fail/damage, thus 185 F. So this is all within specification and it is correct that the Pi doesn't shut down. Seems something different. It is very difficult to reach 85 C even with 1000Mhz overclock settings and 24/7 operation. Maybe ripple in the mains/PSU. This can also be the cause of the relatively high temperature.
In the case of mains ripple, use a mains extension block with peak protection and mains filtering. This may very well also cleanup cheap power supplies.

That's what I thought, but he says this is the temperature on the surface of the RAM chip. Either the RAM chip is overheating, or the CPU temperature is ridiculously high.

Ideally, he should log the output of vcgencmd measure_temp to see what happens exactly.

[Joe Schmoe]

Note that another poster was complaining about his Pi freezing.

Sounds like these two should get together. Between one freezing and the other over-heating, sounds like a match to me.

[drgeoff]

I suspect some part inside the chip that somehow regulates the heat has melted and now the pi just uncontrollably gets hotter after it is turned on.

......


EDIT: Now the outer case of the chip heats to 160ºF, and the keyboard does not work, along with the mouse. The pi doesnt turn off, but it is completely unusable.

EDIT 2: and the pi was working well for the past year or so, this just happened suddenly just yesterday.

There is no such part that regulates the temperature.

Did you attempt to connect something to the GPIO connector just before the RPi started misbehaving?

If you are feeding power to the RPi via the micro-USB socket, you can ignore the other post about the power supply possibly causing overheating of the CPU/GPU/RAM. It cannot.

[Rassilon216]

A very late reply, but:

160 F is only ~72 C. The shutdown temperature is documented as being 85 C and well below actual hardware fail/damage, thus 185 F. So this is all within specification and it is correct that the Pi doesn't shut down. Seems something different. It is very difficult to reach 85 C even with 1000Mhz overclock settings and 24/7 operation. Maybe ripple in the mains/PSU. This can also be the cause of the relatively high temperature.
In the case of mains ripple, use a mains extension block with peak protection and mains filtering. This may very well also cleanup cheap power supplies.

That's what I thought, but he says this is the temperature on the surface of the RAM chip. Either the RAM chip is overheating, or the CPU temperature is ridiculously high.

Ideally, he should log the output of vcgencmd measure_temp to see what happens exactly.

I'm probably seeming like a noob, but whats vcgencmd measure_temp? I was using just an accurate thermometer to measure the temperature of the black casing. what's "vcgencmd measure_temp", and how do I use it? I can connect to the pi from outside to control it I assume.

[ShiftPlusOne]

It's a command to measure core temperature
http://elinux.org/RPI_vcgencmd_usage

[martin ozarek]

i had the same problem my raspi cpu (central processing unit) heats up to 90 degress celcius i had the pi overclocked to turbo before could that have made something in the cpu get damaged and create a contant overheat.
i ran the pi from a wall socket with the raspberry pi kit power supply (5 volts 1500mA) so i tried a power usb hub but still the pi overheats the cpu heats up first then comes the regulators and micro usb cable third of all comes the ethernet controller.
after a while the whole mainboard heats up and then the pi completely shutsdown.
please help i was hoping to make a portable raspi but the project come to a halt due to the pi stopping to work

[lordbaronmarshall]

After a couple of weeks, I think I have an answer to my Pi3 overheating problems... Firefox. Firefox(and Epiphany) are running all four CPUs at 60-70% and spiking at 100%. If I'm just using omxplayer to watch video, then only one core is running 30-40%. All four CPUs running that much will, no doubt, cause overheating. In my case, it's heating to the point of destroying data on the micro sdcard and the usb.
So, unfortunately, I won't be using the Pi for much web browsing, since even when not watching video, the browsers were still keeping all four cores at 30-40%.
Now, other users have reported that Raspian's lite web browser is not having heating issues, nor is it taxing the CPU so heavily. If you will be using your Pi3 mainly for browsing online, then youo may need to stay with the Raspian img and browser. Me personally, I have been running UbuntuMATE and enjoying it a lot, so I hope they get the same fix, or that I can port the Raspian browser to UbuntuMATE.

[paolo_ponzano]

Hi! First of sorry for my bad english
Today i was playing with my rasperry and her gpio.
Suddenly it shutted down, and it no longer wanted ti start.
I've waited a few minutes after which it was still hot to touch.
Then it booted up, and showed me a temperature of ~65° (i have an heatsink with a fan). I'm kinda scared mainly because it heats up also without sdcard inserted(without booting up). How can i solve? Whats broke?