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Old 30-12-2020, 08:26 PM
kens (Ken)
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kens is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 314
The RPi wil start to throttle down from CPU temp somewhere around 80C but it can get to that pretty easily under heavy load. You can check the temperature - the command depends on the OS. In Raspbian its using vcgencmd and on Ubuntu I use "cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp"
I found the unattended-upgrades process was a problem as it put a big load on the system. But the main issue was that under load it was drawing to much current when adding in the wifi, USB drive and the mount (the only device I have connected). So even though I had a 3A buck converter supplying it the voltage dropped enough to kill the Pi (or at least its USB hub). My mount also kept tracking so I just had to reboot to get things working again.
But the solution so far has been to minimise the power load which is why I removed the USB drive (draws up to 220mA). Plus I run Ubuntu server only (no desktop, no VNC) and by turning off driver logging that means minimal IO to the SD card. To be fair, some of this I've also done as I'm running a Pi3 (in fact a Pi2 right now) so I wanted minimal CPU load anyway just for performance.
I believe the official RPi power pack is rated at 3A so with several USB devices connected its rating could be marginal when the CPU is under load.
And if I understand right, with Kstars/Ekos running on the Pi that could be loading up the CPU. Easy to check through the system GUI tools or with the "top" command.
Another thing you could try is to run a bash script that pings the Mac every few seconds and logs the time and result to a file. That way when you reboot you can check the log to see if it was still pinging but had lost connection or had actually shut down. I've got a script if you want to try that.
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