ISSUE:
Took phone out for about 11 hours. Camera switch Off. Won’t charge again
List item - Took L5 out shopping. It was working, but asleep.
Got home, plugged it in. Phone was unplugged - asleep for about 11 hours.
In the morning, the P5 has no lights - nothing
What I did (no lights at all)
A - Held the power button down - nothing
B - Held power and volume up together. - nothing.
C - Removed battery - waited a minute replaced battery - red light came on for about 10
seconds. Nothing else happens. No lights.
D - Checked power cables - all OK
E - Threatened it. - Nothing.
I read another very similar issue here - but it’s only solution was 2 users saying they’ve never had it happen and the thread went dead - about 2 years ago.
If you can find an old li-ion battery charger for an old nokia-like cellphone, match the polarity, and tape down the wires to the + and - pads.
You can also disassemble an e-cigarette charger, same circuit inside.
If you are in a real emergency pinch and have a USB cable to sacrifice, an old one is OK, the Li-Ion battery is still safely in spec to get charged at 5v from USB-A, I would keep it to 5-10 min intervals between trying to boot up.
F. Unplug from charger and remove battery. With battery removed, plug in phone charger. Try to power on. If it powers on, let it boot up. Insert battery without powering off.
I don’t think I’ve had a problem with it since then, but I do notice that sometimes the battery apparently drains unexpectedly while powered down. When it goes down to zero, I think it needs to be connected to an outlet for several hours to allow the battery to build up enough charge to power on again. (Even if there’s no LED indicating that it’s actually charging.)
This my first and last digital phone.
Are you suggesting the power/charger is the issue/history? I just checked the two Puri websites product lists and unless it’s somewhere else, I don’t see I may buy another power adapter/charge.
I do have a couple dozen laptop power adapters and could cut them up. But, I get the impression that A; the adapter is L5 proprietary and if that’s the case, I’d hate to compound the matter taking by on the hat of a phone technician.
I don’t have any of the other things you mention.
It’s not as if I worked the L5 so much I wore the battery to death. On the contrary, I take L5 out once, sometimes twice a week for average 4 - 5 hours and it goes back on the cradle. IMO, battery should still be good.
IMO - what happened mis the L5 battery ran out of the ability to charge because I kept it up too late.
A side note: I was with a friend who has a duop-stalker phone AKA, digital; phone. and it’s battery had a long way to go (78%). Knowing I might be late, I unplugged a Samsung Galaxy S8 Tablet. it was 79% when plugged back in when to it’s charger then I plugged in the L5 c/ adapter
I don’t know at the exact time the L5 battery died because I had no need to wake it until today.
Thanks for chiming in with your ideas - it’s appreciated,
~s
I don’t know how many options there are or the exact number of seconds or even whether or where this is documented but there is some kind of long press that is longer than the usual press for powering on and the long press is a reset that may help if things get in an unusual state e.g. Apparently-dead L5 - #7 by Skalman
Not exactly, it is more that below a certain threshold voltage a battery/charging hardware will consider the battery damaged/failed. Some devices have a low level trickle charge that lets you recover from this below-the-threshold state but most don’t. This is where directly forcing a charge with the dumbest of charge curve devices like the vape-pen charger circuit or even the bare USB 5v in for short boost periods to get the battery above the threshold voltage where the normal charging circuit begins to run normally. I have encountered this issue since at least the openmoko era in the 2003ish time period. It is a safety protocol since the charge circuit can’t evaluate anything else about the li-ion cell and it doesn’t want to put energy into a dead, failed, balooning cell.
On the pinephone there was a tow-boot or u-boot fork that had a special charge mode, but that would require threshold voltage to get into blue-light mode.
I noticed that I sometimes have to hold the power button really long to boot the phone (when counting, which I try to do at second speed, I get sometimes above 40). This is rather anecdotal information, but I have to hold the power button sometimes way longer than what I would expect.
Here is something written about holding the power button for 15 to 18 seconds, but my experience is that sometimes you have to hold the power button longer.
Unfortunately, I am a bit vague here, because I write from what I remember, and I do not know exactly when this happens, and I do not know how to reproduce this. But I think this happened when my battery had been very empty, which I always try to prevent.
there is a datasheet somewhere or notes in the bootloader to tell us what the various button options are at boot. Similar to android going into recovery mode or fastboot mode with pwr&vol+ or - pressed.
I was talking about the moment of powering it off.
The same will happen if you turn it off forcefully by a power button long press.
That would likely mean that the press was interrupted, it needs to be continuous and if you don’t press hard enough you may feel it as pressed while it’s not recognized as such.
i.MX 8M Quad reference manual and u-boot source code. Also, one could implement additional “modes” with u-boot scripts.
