Okay, so my brother was fiddling with my pi and a 9v power supply for an LED strip at the same time, and I assumed shorted something. I can't get you exact replication information. I did some googling that day and guessed it was the polyfuse. I gave the pi 4 days to recover. Still, no dice.
What I've tried:
8 power supplies ranging from 800 mA to 1.5mA with no luck. The most any of them put out (according to the reading across TP1 and TP2) was 4.25 (the 1.5mA one). The rest averaged between 3.5-3.8V.
A few more symptoms:
- The voltage across the polyfuse drops between .2 -.3 ish volts from one side of the fuse to the other. The resistance reads 0.6 ohms.
- After the apparent short, my charger (purchased with the pi, a Canakit set) made a very high pitched ringing sound, which, according to what I've looked up, means the switch inside is moving slower than it should, likely due to a bad capacitor. Never had any problems with the power supply before, even with several USB devices, non-powered.
- If that was all, I would assume it was just the power supply. But I've tried, literally, 8 different 5V wall warts. I really am starting to doubt that it is just the power supply.
- I've had a few occasions where the pi will begin to boot, running the full boot sequence. I've even seen the desktop image and my mouse pointer. That didn't last more than 30 seconds, if even that. It seemed like each time I tried after that, it got worse. Then, sometimes the green light would begin blinking, but no boot screen. Then only a solid red light, no more green light. Then a few times, the red light didn't even come on at all. I measured the voltage for this one and it was less than 2.5V (note: this was from a pretty old power supply I dug up. It's recognized by my phone as a charger, so I assume its still working.)
- The port for the microUSB charger gets quite hot very quickly, as does the capacitor next to it and a few other things in that area. The one time I tried using an HDMI cable, that port got quite hot just as quickly.
Okay, after typing all that up, I'm starting to feel like everything is still pointing to the polyfuse. If this is the case, what can I do but wait? How will I know when its ready? Will it ever be the same?
I'd appreciate some thoughts/advice/insight before I jump online and start buying new chargers and/or a new pi.