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The Xenon Death Flash: How a Camera Nearly Killed the Raspberry Pi 2
The bizarre story of how taking flash photos could instantly crash the Raspberry Pi 2, the community detective work that solved it, and why this strange bug revealed fundamental flaws in modern chip design.
An engineer at EDN Network revealed that his company had encountered the exact same issue twelve years earlier with a CSP amplifier for a cell phone prototype. Testing confirmed that earlier Raspberry Pi models (A, B, A+, B+) had never been vulnerable to the “xenon death flash” effect, making this a uniquely Generation 2 problem that was both discovered and solved by the community. The Raspberry Pi Foundation handled the incident with remarkable transparency, calling it “the most adorable bug we’ve ever come across” and turning it into a physics lesson about the photoelectric effect.
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