John,

You did not say what version of the RPi you had in the closet, but many of the early ones had an ambient operating temperature of 40 degrees C (104 F), which is really not that hot. As you probably know, beginning with the RPi 4th they started talking about needing fans as well as heat sinks. If you were doing any heavy work on the Pi and did not have it set up to throttle back if it got too warm, it could have easily fried itself.

For what it is worth, here are some notes on the RPi 5 cooling. Note that not of it talks about real operating temperatures, just when the fans turn on and by how much. What if the surrounding temperature is very hot and the heat sing and fan can not cool the SoC enough?

https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi-5.html#cooling-raspberry-pi-5

Some manufacturers of SBCs offer an industrial or even a military version of their boards which can have higher ambient temperatures?

On the project I am working on in Brazil we test the units to work with just a heat sink, not a fan, of 70 degrees C (158 F)

On another note, the first RPis also did not do very good with ESD (Electrostatic Discharge). We had 12 Rpis die in the lab while we were working with them, versus none of our boards where we had put in some ESD protection.

Finally, many of the first RPis did NOT have very good power management. Depending on how much current was pulled off the peripherals the CPU could just be starved or too much power pulled through the board.

You may know or have thought about all of these things.

On Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 7:00 PM John Stoffel <john@stoffel.org> wrote:

>>>>> "Tim" == Tim Keller via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:

> So after buying a 4gb model.. Logan found that Adafruit is selling
> the 8GB version for the same price.. so I'm getting the 8GB version.

Tempting for sure, but then I need to add a case, power supply, etc.

Now for my rant, I've got a pair of OrangePi 3LTS boards and I'm
disappointed in them honestly. They work well, but one of them (the
one I put remote to me) just up and died. It doesn't power up and god
knows what happened. It was in a building where nothing else died, so
I don't think it was lightning or anything like that. Maybe just a
crappy USB-C powersupply? Bad batch of boards?

Dunno... just a bit annoyed, especially since the other one I kept at
home for testing of upgrades before I pushed them to the remote one
just keeps on working.

So I'm really thinking I should just pick up a cheap old SFF PC and
put linux on it and just leave that at the remote site where it
*might* be more durable to whatever is killing my SBCs I deply there.

Oh yeah, I had a raspberryPi in the same location and it too died.
Maybe it's just too damn warm in that network closet. But there's
really only just a couple of switches and a wireless AP in there, not
much else in terms of power.

Gah!