8 Ways to Kill a Raspberry Pi

To prevent damage to your Raspberry Pi single-board computer, these are the things you should avoid.

While Raspberry Pi single-board computers are robust for a consumer product designed to tinker with electronics, they are fairly easy to damage permanently in a number of ways.

We present a list of actions and situations that will more often than not severely harm your Raspberry Pi. In case it is not immediately apparent, this is a list of things you should never do to your Raspberry Pi if you intend to continue using it.

It is technically hard to cause damage to the Raspberry Pi via overheating due to the chip throttling safeguard that kicks in when the board’s temperature goes up beyond the set limit of 85℃ (185°F). However, in extreme conditions such as in a hot car or any other thermally conductive enclosure, the heat may cause considerable damage to the SoC and other components over extended periods.

Cooling is a very important factor to consider when you need to run a Raspberry Pi in hot conditions or when it is overclocked. You should take a look at our guide on how to keep your Raspberry Pi cool if overheating is a major concern of yours.

Electrostatic discharge, or ESD, is the transfer of electric current between two electrically charged objects when they come into contact. The most common cause of electrostatic discharge is static electricity buildup.

While typically harmless to humans, ESD is capable of causing sensitive electronic components to break down. Touching conductive parts on the Raspberry Pi while you are electrically charged up will cause damage to the Raspberry Pi. ESD damage may be either catastrophic or latent. In latent failures, the damage may not be evident until weeks or even months later, but it will definitely shorten the lifespan of the device and may cause unexplained glitches from time to time.

Handling the Raspberry Pi without proper electrostatic discharge (ESD) precautions can cause electrostatic damage to sensitive components. The easiest way to protect your Pi from ESD is to keep it in a case. If you need to handle the board, be sure to touch only its edges. Also, consider investing in an ESD mat and an ESD wrist strap.

This one is pretty obvious, but it bears mentioning nevertheless. Your Raspberry Pi should be kept safely and protected in a way that ensures that it is safe from sudden drops, heavy slams, and physical attacks of any kind. Also, liquids don’t agree well with the Pi, especially when connected to a power source. If your Raspberry Pi is splashed with water, make sure it is completely dry before plugging it in.

A protective plastic or metal case will safeguard your Raspberry Pi from most physical damage and protect it from liquids too, at least to an extent.

Reverse polarity occurs when a power source, such as a battery or power supply, is connected with its positive and negative terminals swapped. Unlike most other electronic devices, the Raspberry Pi does not come with reverse polarity protection built in. Therefore, connecting a power supply with reversed polarity can cause serious damage to its components.

For this reason, it is important to use only high-quality power supplies for the Raspberry Pi. If you are building a custom power supply, take extra care to ensure that it allows current to flow in the right direction.

While Raspberry Pis come with a TVS (transient-voltage-suppression) diode to provide some protection against voltage surges, only certain models feature a resettable polyfuse to handle overcurrent—the Pi 4 and Pi Zero lack this feature.

If too much power is supplied, you may be informed via magic smoke from the Pi. Hence, it is very important that your power supply does not supply current to the Raspberry Pi at a voltage that the device is not able to handle. You should also consider a separate surge protector or a capable power supply to protect against sudden power surges.

You can choose from any of the different ways to power a Raspberry Pi, as long as you are supplying the right amount of juice to the device.

This is one of the most common ways to kill a Raspberry Pi, and it is also one of the easiest. A short happens when electricity flows through an unintended low-resistance path, allowing excess current to pass through the circuit and usually resulting in bad situations such as component damage, fires, and even explosions.

Shorting is not a phenomenon that occurs to the Raspberry Pi in normal operation. It is an issue you have to avoid when working with the GPIO pins on the board. For example, connecting any of the power pins (either 3.3V or 5V) to the ground pins will cause a short as the Pi is not designed to allow current to flow through that path. Similarly, shorting a 3.3V pin and a 5V pin may quickly result in a dead Raspberry Pi.

So yes, it is easy to damage a Raspberry Pi by shorting the GPIO pins. If you have to work with the pins on the Raspberry Pi, it is a good idea to turn off your power source first. You should also triple-check your wiring before connecting power again.

Although the entire 40-pin header on the Raspberry Pi is referred to as a GPIO (General-Purpose Input/Output) header, there are only 26 pins marked for general-purpose use. This means that they can be set as either input or output pins and used for a wide variety of electronics projects.

These GPIO pins are rated to work at a maximum voltage of 3.3V and a minimum of 0V. Supplying much more than 3.3V to the GPIO pins is a quick way to fry your Raspberry Pi. Even a brief connection to a 5V pin while the Raspberry Pi is powered on is enough to render your Raspberry Pi unusable.

You have to be careful when powering peripherals from the GPIO pins (and the 3v3 pins) on the Raspberry Pi. You can only safely draw about 16mA from a single GPIO pin and 51mA total from the 3.3V power rail. Trying to draw much more than that will burn out traces in the chip and make the affected pins non-functional. When prolonged, it may cause the entire board to overheat and burn out.

You should instead use the 5V power pins for electronic components that require a high current draw.

Raspberry PIs are durable computers and capable of lasting for as many as ten years of proper use. As long as you are taking necessary precautions before connecting any peripherals and ensuring that your Raspberry Pi is operating in an environment that agrees with its constitution, you can rest assured that your Raspberry Pi will last for as long as possible.

Tomisin is a staff writer at MUO with a penchant for breaking down complex topics into easily digestible bits. He first started writing reviews of phones and gadgets in 2016 and loves reading spec sheets and tinkering with new technology.Currently, he writes about DIY tech for MakeUseOf and looks forward to expanding his horizons.