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Author Topic: I-Pac2 disconnects after a period of time from Raspberry Pi 3  (Read 4562 times)

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md80

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I-Pac2 disconnects after a period of time from Raspberry Pi 3
« on: September 20, 2021, 10:18:50 am »
I did some searching for this, but couldn't find anything. My apologies if there's a topic that addresses this already.

I've got an I-Pac2 hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 3b in a cocktail arcade case. For the most part it works fine, but the connection to the I-Pac seems to periodically have issues where it either no longer registers button presses, or one button is stuck down.

It's a confusing problem because there seem to be a variety of variables that can cause the issue.

First, if it tends to happen when I'm playing and using the buttons. At some point it will stop registering key-presses or get stuck in one direction.

Second, it tends to happen more often in some games than others, although everything is being run through MAME. For example, in Asteroids deluxe, you can only get a few games in before it dies, whereas Pacman tends to go for some time before it fails.

Third, if you leave it for long enough it will happen without any interaction, say 8-12 hours. Even stranger, different games in MAME seem to be prone to it happening more quickly, 4-6 hours for Asteroids deluxe (Again, this is without any iteraction other than me checking if it's still working via the Add Credit button)

I've done the following:

- I thought maybe the Raspberry Pi was overheating, but I added a fan and monitored the temps and it doesn't get much about 41c.
- I swapped out Raspberry Pi's thinking it could just be a hardware issue with that particular Pi. It still fails the same way.
- I thought there could be a voltage issue so I swapped out the power supply for the Pi. I then tried adding a powered USB hub thinking maybe there was a dip in voltage from the Raspberry Pi USB ports.
- I've checked `lsusb` and even after it dies it's correctly listed as a connected USB device (Ultimarc).
- Unplugging the I-Pac and plugging it back in resets it and it works again for some time.

I'd love any thoughts here. At some point I'll likely just buy a new I-Pac and see if that works, but wondering if anyone has any clues about troubleshooting this, or if they've seen something like it before.

Thanks!