Goodbye Raspberry Pi 3

The Raspberry Pi that was powering my house number has died. Sadly, a power outage managed to ruin the SD card I had the software running on. I don’t have any surge protection on the house number Pi, so I guess this was kind of expected.

The SD card itself was fine, so this was not a big issue. Simply reflashing the card fixed these integrity issues, but then I went ahead and killed my board. The LED controller hat I use doesn’t really play nicely with the A series boards, which was the revision I was using. The USB enclosure can short off of the hat, and to get around that I had placed a piece of plastic between the hat and the enclosure - classy I know. Sadly it seems I didn’t quite have that in the right spot and it looked like the short did the board in.

So now I have purchased the new hotness, a Raspberry Pi 4, to power the house number. In pretty much every way the 4 is better than the 3A. While I miss the full-size HDMI input, I do appreciate the ethernet port and better USB placement.

After a bit of trial and error, we are back up and running on the Pi 4.