tpedwards The power cycle was spontaneous during operation. I have rried to reinstall dozens of time. About a third of the time, I get a second page that the update was successful and that it will reboot. It reboots right back to where it was previously.
Oh, and I also changed the power supply to a known, good 3 amp-capable power supply.
red/green flashing lights mean that the obi bootloader has entered an emergency firmware recovery mode because it has read the partitions that you need to boot and noticed that their checksums dont match the expected checksums for those partitions that was written during the last firmware update.
in this mode the bootloader provide a single-use webpage that can only update firmware. this works great for the case where a firmware update was interrupted (probably due to losing power) and you use that webpage to upload new firmware that gets written correctly and everything is happy again on the next boot.
however, in the case where an erase/write cycle doesnt actually leave the desired bits readable from flash (because the flash itself is failing), this checksum verification on boot just results in a endless loop where it tries to write any firmware, but upon reboot notices the checksum mismatch (because the write silently failed) and asks you to upload the firmware again, ad infinitum.
so if you have a good power supply connected and have successfully used the red/green flashing emergency webpage to upload a firmware file a few times but each time the next reboot comes back exactly to red/green flashing emergency mode, then i would believe that your flash chip has failed and the only recovery would involve soldering a new flash chip onto the board (not cost effective). RIP your obi.