Raspberry Pi Zero W


 
Awesome!
Bryan, in my image archive I have a couple builds titled bcm2708, one from April and one from August. The one from april is about 78M and works with the zero-w, the one from august is about 28M and does NOT work with the zero-w, so whatever changes you made that reduced the HM image size likely killed zero-w support.
I had the same issue when re-imaging my zero-w build, after trying every dl I could get from the HM website I loaded my image from april and it just worked.
 
I also just loaded the latest firmware from the DL site onto a spare SD card to try out on my Zero W and it wouldn't fully boot.
 
Well what the heck? I grabbed the latest when I tested it yesterday and it worked just fine on my Pi W. I wonder if there are multiple submodels?

Has anyone tried putting panic=0 into their cmdline.txt to see if it is a kernel panic that is causing the reboot and can get a picture of the stack trace? And is this the preconfigured image or the zip file?
 
Last edited:
I grabbed what was available at heatermeter.com/dl picked the zero w, lil shy of 30mb d/l... nadda

I know I dont have to ask you, but you did do a norestore right? ;)
 
I hadn't but I just tried one with norestore and also created a backup for it to restore and tried again, and finally reimaged it and added the norestore before the first boot. All worked as designed.
 
Odd... i tried 2 different boards, 2 different cards, norestore (since they loaded with the rpi b)... nothing, Ralph gave me his img and it worked 1st try, right into AP mode, then I got in, set the wifi to client and joined my wifi...

Either way, im up, im working, im keeping the img from Ralph, I have a few more zero's that I will monkey with and see if I can get the same results as you.
 
Yeah I just ordered a new Zero W from Adafruit yesterday to see if there is a newer hardware version that fails to boot. My Zero W was one of the release day units so maybe there's a difference between that and what they ended up actually producing.

In the meantime if anyone wants to help me figure out why this is happening, please add panic=0 to cmdline.txt and see if there is a kernel panic causing the reboot. This is a pretty big deal because this firmware that fails to boot on half the devices it was designed to run on was going to be released this week and nobody had reported the issue so we're on a hold now until I can reproduce. Thanks for starting this thread!
 
I will try again tomorrow when I get off work and report back to you... btw, these are all from adafruit, so what I have, is what you should be getting
 
FWIW, I was able to upgrade my Zero W via the online openwrt upgrade process, but I'm unable to boot that same image on an SD card. Trying to locate my mini hdmi adapter so that I can display the output on a screen.
 
I believe I was able to upgrade to the latest version after I setup with the old image as well. So that seems to indicate there is something present in the larger image file that allows compatibility which is absent in the new smaller image. What that is would be up to Bryan to figure out...
 
Yeah my Adafruit Zero W will be here Friday so if it comes early enough I'll be able to at least see if it boots. My parents are coming to stay with me this weekend though so it might be Sunday night or Monday before I can sit down with it. If anyone has any further information before that it might be useful in at least knowing which direction to look.

I am guessing it has something to do with the new squashfs image somehow (which is what makes the image smaller, there is no blank ext4 fs in the image). What size / brand microsd card are you guys using (those with the reboot loops)? Maybe that has something to do with it.
 
I also have been having issues with my Zero W purchased from MicroCenter. I was running Raspbian Stretch just fine and needed...

"ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev" in the wpa_supplicant.conf
 
I also have been having issues with my Zero W purchased from MicroCenter. I was running Raspbian Stretch just fine and needed...

"ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev" in the wpa_supplicant.conf

That's specific to raspbian, which isn't what the heatermeterr runs.
 
I have a copy of a previous snapshot release that works on the zero-w, shoot me a PM and I will share it with you if you need it.
 
I tried with an A+ and a Zero W and I pretty much got the same thing using the smaller 29MB image. As soon as I used the 79MB image on the same SD card, they booted up ok.

I also tried with the image file from openwrt-rpi.zip at https://heatermeter.com/devel/snapshots/bcm2708/ and the results were the same as using the image file from https://heatermeter.com/dl/

Jr5xUr2.jpg


EEzNYN3.jpg
 
Last edited:
Thanks, Steve, that's perfect!

Well then, it is just as I suspected, the root filesystem is failing to mount. The only weird thing that stands out is that it says "new SDHC card at address 1234" which seemed. It looks like you're using a Kingston 8GB microsd there, which I happen to have one of as well, and I get the exact same message but do not get the kernel crash. It is like it can't read from the SD card but reads enough to get the partition information (which is on the SD card).

I looked through kernel and firmware changes in the Pi git to see if there's been changes in the past few months that would indicate new software needed to support newer revisions but I nothing stood out. Hopefully the Zero W I get tomorrow will exhibit the error. I tried a B+ and it also works fine. I don't have an A+ for testing.
 

 

Back
Top