Sudden shutdown of my Pi5 Zynthian with Vangelis

Hardware
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On my Pi5-based Zynthian custom with Vangelis (always up to date) I experienced some occasional sudden shutdowns.

So far I’ve tried to:

  • change power supply using my Zynthian V4’s power supply but nothing changes
  • set WI-FI=Off; I just feel like this makes it more stable but that’s not a certainty

I would like to investigate the causes.

I ask for your help to teach me how to generate LOGs to study later or if you would give me some other suggestions to analize and solve the issues.

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How is the cooling of the Pi5?
Which kind power supply do you use? Does it give 5 A at 5 V reliably? If you connect this to the Pi5 USB-C, then that onboard connector will be the issue, because it simply is not made for such high current and the contacts simply burn out over time, especially with many connect-disconnect-cycles.
Wi-Fi does consume much power and puts a lot of strain onto onboard LDO, so yes, this can be an issue, because reliability of the LDO decays rather quickly under constant overload condition. To test reliably, you may add to config.txt:

dtoverlay=disable-wifi-pi5
dtoverlay=disable-bt-pi5

Did you connect the Pi5 RTC battery and set dtparam=rtc_bbat_vchg=3000000 in config.txt? Adding this setting without connecting the battery will cause strange surges on the power rails.

All additions to config.txt can be done via Webconf → Hardware → Options tick Advanced View → Custom Config. Adding lines in this field writes them directly to config.txt as well and so these settings survive updates and crashes.

If you wand to add a good USB-C power supply to your Zynthian, you may choose a 5V 8A power regulator board (overspec for reliability and thermals) to power the Pi5 via GPIO 5V and GND pins and feed the input with 20V from a USB-C power trigger module set to 20V. This way the USB-C connector will survive much longer, plus you can use a USB-C power bank with 15 to 24V output and about 27W.
More info in my posts about the Zynthian Pocket:

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Persistant logging is explained here:

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I read these lines in Webconf UI log when I switch on:

Oct 17 17:49:08 zynthian startx[1682]: WARNING:zynthian_processor.set_state: Invalid controller for processor Audio Levels: ‘ADC_Left_Input’
Oct 17 17:49:08 zynthian startx[1682]: WARNING:zynthian_processor.set_state: Invalid controller for processor Audio Levels: ‘ADC_Right_Input’
Oct 17 17:49:08 zynthian startx[1682]: WARNING:zynthian_processor.set_state: Invalid controller for processor Audio Levels: ‘Digital_0’
Oct 17 17:49:08 zynthian startx[1682]: WARNING:zynthian_processor.set_state: Invalid controller for processor Audio Levels: ‘Digital_1’
Oct 17 17:49:08 zynthian startx[1682]: WARNING:zynthian_processor.set_state: Invalid controller for processor Audio Levels: ‘PGA_Gain_Left’
Oct 17 17:49:08 zynthian startx[1682]: WARNING:zynthian_processor.set_state: Invalid controller for processor Audio Levels: ‘PGA_Gain_Right’

my audio card is set as Justboom DAC

what does it mean? I am wondering if it can cause sudden shutdown