External battery charger for Librem5

[Bc5000]

I work for a battery store, and we sell Universal cell phone / camera battery chargers and they should work. Just make sure you read the reviews of whatever you’re going to buy to make sure it’s not going to blow up your battery. 90% of Lithium-ion cellphone batteries are the same charging wise
Edit:forgot a word

[fsflover]

Charging Librem 5 Batteries Outside of Phone

I am thinking of guys who work in construction with battery-powered tools–they always have extra batteries charging, so that they can swap out a depleted battery for a full one without requiring a break from the work. Does an easy solution exist to charge a Librem 5 battery without putting it inside the Librem 5?

[carlosgonz]

I don’t think the Librem 5 needs to charge one extra battery to operate for a day use. Instead of charging an extra battery do this:

• enable white theme to reduce screen brightness to save battery.
• enable auto suspend to save battery.
  Do not compare/never the performance of battery from an Android device to a pure GNU+Linux phone that still requires of big optimizations to save energy to be close to android machines so we need to use less a gnu+linux phone compared to the conventional.

[librem5]

Using white theme is better over black?
Would notifications work on auto suspend? Also I thought auto suspend is already ON.
I’m not comparing battery to anything but definitely prefer longer battery life.

[carlosgonz]

Black it for Night, white it for Day, so white theme it help to save a lot of battery to Librem 5, but you need to considere and to help to L5 to low the brightness until you can see well, unfortunately at the moment we can’t afford to keep a screen with high brightness, because L5 it using an excellent screen but with old technology compared to oled screens where they are energy efficient

[carlosgonz]

@librem5

Would notifications work on auto suspend? Also I thought auto suspend is already ON.

Status of Suspend for Librem 5

I guess that Purism will perform a hack to enable the WLAN under Redpine card, to get data and notifications all the time under suspended mode. Also i guess that Purism will sale an enhanced wlan-card to fully fix all the issues related to Redpine to get a better L5 funtions.

[Quarnero]

@librem5

but not sure if it’s compatible

It is not while wide opening for inserting of some battery is up to 55mm (not slightly over 60mm, as needed).

Yet this one charges L5 battery up to max. of 4.2V (as officially and strongly recommended):

@Quarnero

Even charging once or occasionally your battery outside of Librem 5 might help

Note: Above linked (to aliexpress.com) product doesn’t include any kind of additional adapter (EU for example), it is made for US infrastructure only although compatible AC input ranges from 110V to 240V. Also, its charging speed would be 800mA which would coarse mean that cca. twice longer time needed up to 100% (4.20V) of L5 battery usual capacity.

[librem5]

You mentioned it right on time, phone seems to be dead since this morning. I see similar issues as that thread, phone turns on and runs for few minutes before being unresponsive.
Right now it’s sitting on ‘Installing Updates…’ at 80% for last 15 minutes, I’ll need to find a way to start from scratch I guess.

I may start another thread about unresponsive phone.

[Quarnero]

@librem5

You mentioned it right on time, phone seems to be dead since this morning.

Sure (just currently ), if jour Librem 5 was not turned off overnight (for 8+ hours).

@librem5

I see similar issues as that thread, phone turns on and runs for few minutes before being unresponsive.

If battery capacity less than 10% this might/should be expected (but my opinion is not the expert one and probably not even the relevant one here, @librem5, please keep us informed).

Please try this one first:

@Quarnero

Up to here linked page recommendations it is written: “ Birch 8. When the red light turns off the battery is fully charged. ” Please poweroff your Librem 5 Evergreen while on and (still) connected to its original power supply and wait until constant red LED light turns completely off.

This self regulating of stopping charging (red LED light off) I’m finding as just another Librem 5 great feature (only phone with such capability, if this term as technical correct). Thanks for this to all involved! Thanks @dos!

[irvinewade]

@librem5

I thought auto suspend is already ON.

Not by default I think. Some gremlins still to deal with.

Status of Suspend for Librem 5

[librem5]

Sorry I couldn’t understand the post clearly. However here is summary.
I turned off phone (had around 20% battery), charged until red LED off (took about 4 hrs).
Turned on phone and it’s working right now.

I’ve also disabled ssh systemctl disable ssh . I think ssh access was causing hang up, if someone can confirm this (I may try to re-enable and see some later time). Disabling ssh was enough to get phone working even at 20% battery (Oh and shell is changed to zsh so in case ssh with zsh causes issue)

[librem5]

Phone froze up again this morning. It was charging overnight so battery isn’t issue. I’ll start another thread and enable ssh again for debug.

[librem5]

Adding some details here:
I didn’t replace pureos-store with gnome-software. I’m currently trying to flash latest image.

Flashing seems to be stuck on:
1:12 1/ 1 [=================100%=================] SDP: boot -f u-boot-librem5.imx 100%|██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 1073880/1073880 [00:18<00:00, 1901894.86it/s]

[librem5]

I’ve tried installing uuu and jumpdrive from source but that didn’t resolve it. Process is still stuck at SDP: boot.

On the side note: external charger works (https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Battery-Charger-chargering-Samsung/dp/B07SWV43H9)

[carlosgonz]

Can you try on a usb-2.0 port? sometimes failed on usb-3.0

[librem5]

Oh tried both (cable that came with phone - USB-3.0 and one cable that I already had - USB-2.0). Tried USB-3.0 less than USB-2.0 (tried about 8 times on USB-2.0 and 2 times on USB-3.0)

[carlosgonz]

Try different usb port with sudo and different usb cables. This issue happened to me one time, i not remember well how, why, this issue it happen to flash L5. Also you can use a different computer too.

[librem5]

I’ve tried sudo and non-sudo (after adding udev rules) that didn’t help.
Let me try different USB ports (this didn’t help either).

One more thing I’ve noticed:

If I keep flash script running (before plugging in phone), I don’t see solid red LED on battery insertion. (LED goes blinking red -> solid green)

If script is not running then I see behavior mentioned under steps at https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Phone/Troubleshooting/Reflashing_the_Phone.html (blinking red -> solid red) and then I start script.

[Quarnero]

@librem5

(blinking red -> solid red) and then I start script.

This procedure I like better, yet it will not work if this prerequisite (connection) isn’t achieved:

@dcz

except the phone didn’t enter the flashing mode like in your previous post where you confirmed it by using uuu -lsusb.

[librem5]

Using different computer didn’t work however I got more details:
Trying to debug jumpdrive boot process:
Output of uuu -lsusb
uuu (Universal Update Utility) for nxp imx chips – libuuu_1.4.193-0-ge56424c

Connected Known USB Devices
	Path	 Chip	 Pro	 Vid	 Pid	 BcdVersion
	==================================================
	1:5	 MX8MQ	 SDP:	 0x1FC9	0x012B	 0x0001

boot-purism-librem5.sh has uuu purism-librem5.lst and purism-librem5.lst has all uuu commands listed.
so I started uuu shell with uuu -s and executed commands from lst.

Please input command: 
U>CFG: FB:  -vid 0x316d -pid 0x4c05
>Start Cmd:CFG: FB:  -vid 0x316d -pid 0x4c05
Okay
U>CFG: SDP: -chip MX8MQ -compatible MX8MQ -vid 0x316d -pid 0x4c05
>Start Cmd:CFG: SDP: -chip MX8MQ -compatible MX8MQ -vid 0x316d -pid 0x4c05
Okay
U>SDP: boot -f u-boot-librem5.bin
>Start Cmd:SDP: boot -f u-boot-librem5.bin
New USB Device Attached at 1:5
100%1:5>Okay (3.057s)
Okay
U>SDPU: delay 1000
1:5>Start Cmd:SDPU: delay 1000
Wait for Known USB \
Wait for Known USB /


Wait for Known USB -
Wait for Known USB \
Wait for Known USB | /