Not booting up - light flashing red

Troubleshooting
1

My device is no longer booting up - the on/standby light just flashes red. Cyclng the power has no effect.

As there are no controls anywhere on it there doesnt seem to be much I can do?

2

I have the same problem. Was there a solution? One AmpliPi and two extenders flashing red.

3

Hey Xenoi!

The red flashing light is a “Something is wrong that is preventing AmpliPi from starting” light, which could mean there’s a bad software situation or some sort of hardware damage.

I’ll suggest responding to this via support@micro-nova.com as to avoid functionally CC’ing Mininman with every step of the solution process, but here’s the flow chart for how to diagnose issues from this point to help you and all future visitors to this thread:

What level of access do you have?

  1. Can you access the updater at http://amplipi.local:5001/update?

  2. Can you access logs at http://amplipi.local:19531/entries and send them to us?

If they are both unavailable:

If you can’t reach either of those, I’ll need you to open the lid of your unit and look for what debug LEDs are illuminated, there’s 3 on the power board (the one at the center of the unit with all the wires going to it) and 2 on the control board (the one that’s on stilts that has the networking port and USBs on the back of the unit), see the attached pictures for where to find said LEDs. They should all be solidly illuminated except for the one closest to the back of the unit on the control board, which should flash as read and write cycles complete.

Power Board (Center of unit):

pwrled
pwrled814×1069 376 KB

Control Board (Top rear of unit):

ctrlled
ctrlled649×486 151 KB

If you can access both:

If you can access both of those, we’ll likely need to do some more precise debugging to solve the issue.

If you want to simply solve your issues without back and forth and don’t mind potentially losing your system configuration, you can follow this guide to reflash your unit. This is like a harder factory reset that will forcibly set your system to a known-good state, though depending on when you’re reading this guide it may require you to update afterwards

If you’re technical enough to know how to use SSH tools, you can potentially save your config by ssh’ing into pi@[ip] with the same password and IP as seen on the screen on the front of your unit. You can find your config at `.config/amplipi/house.json` so you can save that to your computer and reupload it on the Settings → Configuration → Upload Config option post-reflash to retain your data (assuming that the issue isn’t the config itself being corrupted)

If you can access only one:

That will require more detail and debugging:

  1. If you can only access logs, send us the logs

  2. If you can only access the updater, go to the support tunnel tab and follow the instructions there

4

In my situation, one of the wire harnesses was making contact with the top lid of the unit which was causing one of the pins to come loose.

It booted up fine with the top lid off, but turned off if the lid was put back in place. A replacement harness with tighter connections solved the issue long term.