[Solved / Archived] Using Witty Pi Mini (2) with Raspberry Pi 4B

Posted by: @bransonio

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my Pi 4B does not properly boot

What is its actual behavior then?

@admin Hi there,

Upon pressing the power button on the Witty unit, the power comes on in my Pi 4 for about 2 seconds, then the Pi turns off, and Witty enters standby mode.

If I do not have the Witty unit attached, my Pi turns on, but never displays to the monitor. The green light flashes rapidly and dimly. 

Are you aware of anyone who has successfully used a Witty Pi Mini / 2 with a RasPi4?

One more detail... out of curiosity, I installed the Witty Pi 4 software on my Pi 4B. Without attaching the Witty Pi hardware (which I suspect wouldn't work with the WP4 software anyway), my Pi 4B won't boot. The red light stays on consistently, and my monitor seems to, briefly, detect an HDMI signal, but only enough for the monitor to come on. The green light flashes occasionally. Is this expected behavior from the software when no Witty Pi is attached?

Hi there,

I hope you will forgive my triple-post, but I am continuing to troubleshoot here and suspect we are in quite different timezones.

I have noticed that the install script in each of the Witty Pi software packages includes a boot command that sets the core frequency of the Pi device. However, I have read in the RasPi 4 documentation that attempting to set the core freq will result in a no-boot condition. When I remove this line from the boot config, the Pi is able to boot. I am perplexed, because it seems that other people have been able to run this on RaspberryPi 4 units... so I suspect the issue lays somewhere in the software. 

When Raspberry Pi 4 was released in 2019, Witty Pi 2 has been discontinued. That means we had not tested Witty Pi 2 on Raspberry Pi 4.

Witty Pi 2 doesn't have a micro-controller, instead it uses analog circuit to achieve all these, and its behavior may vary if the Pi model is changed. For example, the internal pull up resistor of GPIO-4 may affect the behavior significantly. I am not saying Witty Pi 2 can not work on Raspberry Pi 4 -- it may work, but there is not garentee for that.

Pi 4 doesn't support changing core freq, but we never have problem with that, and there is no user complained about this issue too.

@admin Hi there,

I have since my last post purchased your Witty Pi Mini 4 from Adafruit. I have the same problem.

Can you please confirm that your device works on the Raspberry Pi 4B? It is advertised to, but I believe it does not. I cannot find any evidence from this forum or elsewhere that the device works on the Raspberry Pi 4B. I love the idea of this product and hope we can get it to work.

@bransonio Witty Pi 4 Mini works with Raspberry Pi 4B. We have many users use Witty Pi 4 on Raspberry Pi 4B. Usually you need a stacking header to make relaiable connection.

@admin Ok, thanks. I went into the config.txt file and commented out the following line: core_freq=250. It now works. Unclear why this line appears when installing the software package on my 4B, but my tests so far indicate that all is working properly now that it has been removed.

Thank you and best wishes. 

@bransonio Although we have been told the core_freq configuration is not supported on 4B (and might cause problem), it is the first time we receive such report. We will update the installation script and have it removed for Pi 4.