Turning Pi On and Off

Soldato
Joined
2 May 2011
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12,133
Location
Woking
Hey guys,

How do you manage the turning on and off of your Pis? I'm using mine with Retropie to play games on, but find it very weird about turning on an off.

Easy to turn it off properly or just pull the plug, and then I tend to switch it off at the wall. But then if I switch it back on, it doesn't just start up. I have to pull the plug (micro-usb lead) and then put it back in for it to start.

What's going on?! How do you deal with this?
 
Because they're in an awkward place to pull the power, so I don't. If they need a reboot I send a reboot command.

There are a couple of header pin solder points in the pi board so you can wire in a reset switch, don't know if that would fire one up once powered down. Maybe worth a try. Said switch could be on a long wire for placement away from the pi. One of the jobs I've been meaning to do but never get around to!
 
Fair enough. If I use the shutdown on the Pi, there doesn't seem to be a way to get it to start back up again. I feel like it really does need a power button, but the way the converters work, I believe they'll always be drawing some power. Whilst this isn't a huge concern, I would rather that none was drawn, so I think the best solution is to have a plug that the converter plugs in to and switches on and off.

I've seen plug sockets with remote controls that do this, but whether the Pi would start up again after, I don't know.
 
It's something that bothers me with the Pi.

I had a Pi 1 model B running Openelec. I left it running but then when you flicked back from HDMI 2 (sky) to HDMI 1 (RasPi) it wouldn't respond. All you could do was pull the plug and restart.

If it wasn't on HDMI 1 it wouldn't restart at all.

After doing this a few times it would corrupt the SD card leaving it unusable.

Had the same problem with Retropie.

Pi3 seems to stay on ok when changing HDMI channels and not had any real issues yet leaving it on.
 
It's something that bothers me with the Pi.

I had a Pi 1 model B running Openelec. I left it running but then when you flicked back from HDMI 2 (sky) to HDMI 1 (RasPi) it wouldn't respond. All you could do was pull the plug and restart.

If it wasn't on HDMI 1 it wouldn't restart at all.

After doing this a few times it would corrupt the SD card leaving it unusable.

Had the same problem with Retropie.

Pi3 seems to stay on ok when changing HDMI channels and not had any real issues yet leaving it on.

Funny you say that because I don't turn my Pi (3) off at all and it's running OSMC. We've got Sky on HDMI 1 and Pi on HDMI 2. When we switch from Sky to Pi everything is fine but when we go from Pi to Sky, the sky will freeze and needs a hard reset. The only way around it is to put the sky box into standby before switching to HDMI2 for the Pi and then when you switch back, turn it back on.

Wonder if there's a link there?
 
My Pi is powered from a usb on my TV, so when i turn it on/off, the Pi switches with it.
I would have thought doing it this way would be quite common.
 
My Pi is powered from a usb on my TV, so when i turn it on/off, the Pi switches with it.
I would have thought doing it this way would be quite common.

Does that give it enough power? I have a 1.2A psu and I still get the little box in the corner of the screen saying its underpowered, still runs alright though.

USB2 is max 500mA isn't it?
 
Get a RemotePi board from Here. I use mine to allow my RasPlex to turn on and off with my other equipment via my Logitech remote. RetroPi is on the cards for the future too.

Nice, thanks for that!

My Pi is powered from a usb on my TV, so when i turn it on/off, the Pi switches with it.
I would have thought doing it this way would be quite common.

Oh man, I think that this is easily the best solution!!

Just leave it on, uses like 2Watts. Probably costs about £1-2 per year to leave on.

Maybe, the transformer definitely gets hot though.
 
My Pi is powered from a usb on my TV, so when i turn it on/off, the Pi switches with it.
I would have thought doing it this way would be quite common.

Is it not a bad idea to simply power down the Pi rather than gracefully shut it down? Doesn't the RemotePi tell the Pi to shutdown via a GPIO pin before it removes the power?
 
Turning off the power when TV goes off is a bad idea, you'll end up corrupting the SD card.

It's like pulling the power cord from your PC when it's in the middle of something.

Just leave it on.

Consider it as extra heating for your house.
 
Is it not a bad idea to simply power down the Pi rather than gracefully shut it down?
Turning off the power when TV goes off is a bad idea, you'll end up corrupting the SD card.
To answer both those quotes, you will only corrupt the SD partition if it is saving a file as it cuts off.
I'm only running recalbox + kodi, so there is no saving involved at all.
Been doing this for about 2 years now.
 
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