Cracked case because of puffy battery? Help me fix it please.

[the_marshal]

Well, the charging chip from TI as well as the battery has an overloading protection AFAIK, so it won't pump energy into the battery forever.


The speed of charging, etc. could be a bit more optimized for Li-Pos maybe, yeah, definately something to look into, but AFAIK Michael was very thorough about that.


My battery is still going fine, and I've been using it regularly since end of 2009, so I don't think this is the charging itself.


In the same time, two Motorola V600 batteries puffed up


Well, one thing to remember is that those batteries are from 2009 - it might be some had been damaged by not keeping them charged. I am recharging them every few weeks, but it might be one gets overlooked, etc.


The new ones are already on the way though, and they don't have to wait for Pandoras as long as the first ones had to.

I am sure you have already seen this topic:


So I am just wandering if there is really no issue with trickle charging and lipo ? Anything that can improve the battery life is good in my opinion.

 

[gdap]

Just a quick update...


My Pandy is in now in Blighty.


I emailed my RMA request 3 weeks ago which was responded to with instructions within 2 days after I sent it. Sent the Pandora by normal Canada post and this week I got an email from Debs saying that they have received it.


All in all, quite happy with the response I am getting considering they are so swamped.





Thanks TeamOP.

 

[kneehighspy]

i guess the power on/off/standby/shutdown features seem to confuse me. the manual states sliding the power switch to the right enables and disables power saving. seems my unit doesn't know what it wants to do sometimes. if i put the unit in sleep, the unit goes off, green led goes off and red charge led stays on, which to me is the normal operation. but sometimes when doing this, the charge light goes off, green light stays on, but the unit goes into sleep mode. a lot of times the charge light will not come back on after this until i unplug the unit and plug the charger back in.


sometimes when i go to shutdown (via logoff ui) the unit, it will go through shutdown but then sit at the powered by angstrom screen - release 1 - "zaxxon" (like i tried just now and it's doing this), and the screen stays there, the unit never shuts down, but the charge led and power led are off. unit will not power down, but will hard reset (Pandora key / power switch to right) or you can take the battery out.


doing a sudo shutdown -P now seems to start the unit shutting down, but it still hangs at a locked up terminal, need to hard reset. seems i can't do an actual shutdown, just put in standby mode or remove the battery. and the tod clock doesn't keep the proper time after a hard reset or battery removal. doesn't the tod clock have a battery backup or a cap charge to keep the internal clock running?


any ideas?

 

[WizardStan]

if i put the unit in sleep, the unit goes off, green led goes off and red charge led stays on, which to me is the normal operation.

Are you sure it's going off? Low power mode at the moment really only turns off the LCD and wifi, and then dims the power LED to let you know it is in low power mode. With the charge LED on bright, it's hard to tell, but if you look really close and careful you should be able to see it faintly, it shouldn't shut it off completely. If it is, that's definitely not normal behavior. Not only is it not normal, it's practically impossible: without modification to the software controlling the charge circuit, the Pandora will actually reboot if the AC charger is plugged in when you shut it off.

but sometimes when doing this, the charge light goes off, green light stays on, but the unit goes into sleep mode. a lot of times the charge light will not come back on after this until i unplug the unit and plug the charger back in.

When you say the green light stays on, do you mean on full, or is it dimmed? As I said, that's the expected behaviour, to dim the light when in sleep mode.


As far as the charge light going out, that might be normal, if the battery was at 100%. The charge chip detects the battery is full when the current it can put into the battery drops below a certain threshold. If the Pandora is in low power mode, it is using less energy, so it is easier to reach this "full charge" threshold. If it is not in low power mode, it tends to use more energy than this threshold, so the charge chip can't detect the battery is full. When it does this, it simply turns off the red charge LED. This is just default behaviour of the LED and I hope to have something a little more user friendly added to hotfix 6.


The other thing it does is that it won't restart charging until it drops below a certain voltage level, or you remove the AC and plug it back in. By default, that level is around 80%, but I'm tweaking it to get it up around 95% so you can still have a reasonable charge in the morning.

sometimes when i go to shutdown (via logoff ui) the unit, it will go through shutdown but then sit at the powered by angstrom screen

Ok, now that's one I don't have a simple solution for. Only thing I can think with it failing to shut down is a problem with the firmware. A reflash never hurt anything, and might clear up any glitches you are having.


And no, the clock doesn't have a backup battery, it is run directly off the Pandora's battery, the one true flaw I feel in MWeston's design. Pull the battery, and the clock stops. Leave the battery out for a few minutes and it should actually reset.