Problems powering Raspberry Pi from GPIO header

September 5th, 2012, 00:50 Posted By: wraggster


[Zaion] grabbed an ATX power supply to source the 5V the Raspberry Pi needs to run. The common problem when it comes to RPi supplies is a shortfall in how much current a USB wall adapter can source. The ATX shouldn’t have this problem, but none-the-less he found that the USB ports were only reading about 5V. Strange. He grabbed the soldering iron and fixed the issue with a piece of jumper wire (English translation found in the second half of his post).
The problem was discovered when trying to get a WiFi dongle to work on one of the RPi’s USB ports. It simply wouldn’t show up, and after going down the blind alley of assuming it was a driver problem he started to investigate the hardware. After discovering the below-nominal voltage [Zaion] measured the resistance between the 5V pin on the GPIO header and the one on the USB port. It reads 3-4 Ohms and he concluded that the trace is too thin. We took a quick look at the schematic for the boardand see no reason for the voltage drop. His jumper wire fixed the issue but it leaves us wondering, is this an isolated case, or a design flaw? Tell us what you think in the comments section.

http://hackaday.com/2012/09/04/probl...m-gpio-header/

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