My RPi 3B died

[ssfc72]

Well, the RPi that I was using with the MotionEye OS program (motion detecting video recording) has stopped working. :-(
The red led is on, showing that it is getting power, but the green led does not blink on, to show that the RPi is operating.
I switched out the SD card with one that has a working Raspbian OS, on it and it does not boot.  I used the power supply from my other RPi 3B and that did not help.
I am quite disappointed that the RPi failed because it hadn't seen that much use.
I googled the problem and there were some reports of this problem but there was not much to help me repair the RPi.  There was one article about replacing a diode on the board, so I am going to check that out with a voltmeter.

[Jason]

That's sad. I have one, too, and I'm not sure if it died or I just have a dead SD card. It won't boot either with the light showing as on. I didn't have a heatsink on it and I saw the temp warning in the right but it's supposed to throttle down the CPU when that happens. I think I only used it like that a small number of times. The rest of the time, it was quite warm in my house and I put in the path of the fan so it was cooling from that as I wan. I'm thinking the CPU burnt out but I never got around to getting another SD card to find out.

I hope with you that it's something you can fix. Were you using a heatsink? I'll give mine another try after seeing if I can un-corrupt the SD card (if that's the issue).

It makes me wonder if these things come with a warranty even though we'd both already be outside of it.

[ssfc72]

Yes, I had 2 heat sinks, on the board. Before the Pi stopped working, I had held my finger on the one heat sink and it was quite toasty. It was hot, but I could leave my finger on the heat sink for quite awhile, without having to remove my finger. The other heat sink was not even warm.

The Pi, with the MotionEye OS was running 24/7 for a few months.

[Jason]

So, I'm guessing the CPU didn't get toasted. The heat sink is doing what it should. If it was cool, I'd be worried since that would mean it wasn't transferring any heat from the CPU.

[buster]

Apparently they should run a long time. Picked this up from a forum:

    Alex_raspberry wrote:
    Hi

    For a project I need to use a raspberry pi which should be working 24/7 ,
    I'm kind of worried about lifespan issue...
    How long is the lifespan of a raspberry pi?

    thanks

Lifespan should be exactly the same as any other computer. Most run for more than 10 years. Capacitors are what usually go bad and there aren't many on the Pi. The sdcard, on the other hand, is likely to experience errors the first time there is unexpected power loss. This can be mitigated by running a special image in which the sdcard is mounted read only. While often recommended, there is no standard sdcard image of this type. Maybe others can make recommendations.

[ssfc72]

Thanks for the info, Buster.

I put the sd card with the MotionEye OS, into my other RPi 3 B  and MotionEye started up fine and I configured some of the settings.  I didn't setup any motion detection for now.  I am just using the RPi to show my driveway and street, on my computer.

[Jason]

I don't have information to prove it but I really doubt that SD cards are as reliable as HDDs or SSDs. I hear about people losing data on SD cards all the time, However, maybe they lost data because they didn't properly eject the cards in the OS. You wouldn't necessary lose data. That'd only happen if the OS was writing to the drive at the time you physically ejected it.

It's no longer necessary in Windows (they changed that several feature updates ago) but I still do it by force of habit in Win10 and Linux. I'm not sure if it's still recommended for Linux though.