Hello all,
I’ve had my uconsole since June, everything seemed like it was working well for a couple of months. Over the last 2 weeks I’d noticed some odd behavior around power/charging. The batteries weren’t taking a charge while in use or if I left the device plugged in and powered off to what should have been the charging state. Over the next few days the device began to power off unexpectedly with increasing frequency. Finally, just a few days ago it no longer powered on. Now when I connect any power source to it, either charged batteries or a USB-C transformer the device no longer boots at all, no green power light, no screen backlight, no signs of life of any kind. I’ve disassembled everything and put it back together, but can’t get any signs of life out of it. I’m still in my 6 month warranty period. Just not sure what to do next. Suggestions welcome.
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Contact alex@clockworkpi.com I would say.
Is your battery module properly inserted? Bookworm 6.12.y for the uConsole and DevTerm - #362 by Rex
Try another batteries / try to use external charger if you have one
uConsole should boot on usb-c cable even without batteries, so try to remove batteries and run it again.
also try another sd card / try to boot without sd-card and batteries
Clearly, the former already tried running on USB-C power. Still no dice.
Claim it. The power supply is fudged. Much better if you can provide tangible evidence that it is defective. Perhaps include measurements and/or video footage.
I agree that a warranty claim is the best option here. Pete, thank you for taking the time to thoroughly describe the steps you have taken to diagnose this issue.
It was not specified that Pete had tried USB-C power without batteries installed. I think this is worth a try; at least on laptops with similar issues, when an external supply is present and batteries aren’t, they can sometimes come to life when they hadn’t otherwise, whether or not the battery itself is functional. Also, Pete, could you explain how you know the batteries you’re using are charged, and with what setup you’re charging them?
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I have tried to run the device both with the batteries removed, as well as trying to power it on with the entire battery module removed from the chassis(not sure if that would or wouldn’t work, but gave it a try with no batteries when powering from an official RPi 5 transformer or a Dell USBC power supply). I have a standard 4 cell lithium battery charger, and can recharge the batteries to full power there, the charger has a 4 bar indicator to show the charge status. After charging externally I see no drop in the charge level of the cells, even after many many attempts to power the uConsole up.
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It seems you have exhausted your options for troubleshooting. Even if this was outside the warranty window, this is an interesting enough failure that I would hope the folks at ClockworkPi would take back your mainboard and give you a working one, so that they could diagnose the issue and determine whether it could become widespread.
they sell mainboard for 40 USD (may be old version): https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/clockworkpi-v3-14
and it was developed for CM3 initially. I’m pretty sure it dead for them.
they no longer produce old versions, devterms produced after the uconsole launch also had the v5 mainboard
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