There's a weird problem with the new Raspberry Pi computer
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced on February 2 the new Raspberry Pi 2, a more powerful version of the computer that first debuted in 2012.
Early customers of the Raspberry Pi 2 have been testing it out - and they've found a pretty strange problem with it.
It turns out that if you try and take a photo of the Raspberry Pi 2 using a certain type of camera, it crashes and turns off.
Here's a video that shows the problem:
What's going on here is pretty weird. Any cameras with a Xenon flash trigger a reaction in a chip on the Raspberry Pi. One of the chips on the exposed computer's circuit board seems to be sensitive to light and poorly shielded, so when the camera's flash triggers, it causes the entire device to crash.
Xenon flashes are stronger than normal flashes, so they don't appear in many smartphones. But one poster on the official Raspberry Pi forum has discovered that a Samsung K zoom has a Xenon flash that triggers the glitch.
The flash glitch wasn't present in older models of the Raspberry Pi. It looks like it's a new problem found only in the Raspberry Pi 2 that went on sale this month. Right now the only way to get around this is to cover the U16 chip up with something (most people are using Blu-Tack.)