Pinebook (non-Pro) battery swollen - No complete start without it?

[guidol]

Yesterday I did start to install armbian trixie iot on my Pinebook.
Second part in debian - after the u-boot) starts, but then the Pinebook shuts off, because of a low battery(?)

I did charge the whole day and powered off in the evening.
 

Today the Pinebook stand on my table with a swollen battery. I removed it and happily it doesnt crash anything else than the battery holder.

 

But now it doenst boot up complete like with a low battery.

After the u-boot debian trixie does boot , but at the middle of the messages it does shutdown
Can it run completly without battery? I have normally a 5V/2Ah power-supply connected and that did work the last years.

 

Now I can only try to use a 5V/60W quick-charge Power-Supply.
Anyone has experiences with that?

Thanks for info in advance...

 

[eselarm]

22 hours ago, guidol said:

But now it doenst boot up complete like with a low battery.

After the u-boot debian trixie does boot , but at the middle of the messages it does shutdown

There are schematics available for this device, so one could get a hint from those, but depends if you have electronics background or not. To me it seems that higher level software in Debian/Linux enables power management handling all the way using info it gets from the power management chip/circuitry. You can guess that for this device, same as smartphone, battery operation is considered primary/essential, so decision is 'low-batt' and shutdown. 

 

I have a BananaPi M1 that also has LiPo charging, but that is DIY soldereing, so no OS component bothers with not-connected cell, but if a cell is connected/soldered which I did, is charges and runs on that cell if microUSB PSU (they call it 'AC' in the chip signal names) is disconnected, although its SATA port is unpowered then. Runs Armbian Trixie CLI only (eth + serial console).

 

An old business HP 2-core laptop that I got without battery and HDD runs fine on just the original HP power adaptor (has 3rd wire for some genuine HP charger purposes). 

 

For USB-C powered devices, there might be many things to deal with, e.g. my ROCK5B after un-boxing goes in a bootloop with a RPI5 PSU, was/is know, so I feed it with own 12V USB-C pig-tail. For the Pinebook, it might be that the 5V is perfectly 5.000V but drops to 4.900V or so in spikes under load, so the typical 5V SBC powering issue well-known from RPi and other cheap SBCs that cannot handle >5V USB PD voltages.

 

The Pinebook might do well if you fake the battery, so look at colored wire/connector. I have used that several times in the past decades. The yellow wire might be for temperature so besides a proper voltage on black and red, you also need to do something with the yellow wire I guess.

 

It also might be that is you skip/disable the parts of software that do power management handling, that it runs fine. So I would boot/run the 'image' of the pinebook in a systemd-nspawn container or libvirt VM (at least the user space) and see what is what. Maybe it is something like purge 'laptop-tools' package or so, or blacklist the kernel module for power management. 

Edited 2 hours ago by eselarm

[guidol]

Yes the WTL-40110175 3.8v 10.000mAh battery has

3x red (PB+) and

3x black (PB- GND)

and

1x yellow (Overvoltage?) or Temperature)

 

Here in Turkey I do only find  a 3.7v 10.000mAh Cell, but without the yellow cable (only red and black):

https://www.n11.com/urun/1260110-37v-10000mah-li-polymer-pil-devreli15a-87767963

 

The battery PDF gives me very less clues

Pinebook-WTL40110175-3_8V-10000mAh-14inch.pdf