Serious heat issue with Fuze V2

[noco]

Does the bat. gauge stay in the red?

I've noticed on mine it stays in the red, but never actually dies.

It jumps up to half, then down to red, then quarter the way full then red, etc.

I noticed that with the original firmware AND rockbox but i thought with rockbox it drops faster. I think i'll give the Fuze with rockbox a last try in every day use and hope that the battery will last long enough.
Post Merge: March 29, 2011, 03:27:39 PMUnfortnunately the battery drops really fast with rockbox. It was almost full and didn't last over 2 hours. Looking at the heat the player produces all the time in my opinion this is really understandable. Now I ordered a Clip+. If you see any chance that another Fuze will work better, is maybe I'll buy another Fuze but at the moment I don't want to risk buying another player not working with rockbox.

[noco]

I believe I found out what the heat was creating. It was the sdhc card ich had put in. Without this card the player gets cooler if the display is off.

Any ideas what I can do about this? I need the 16GB card. Might there be any rockbox version which works with sdhc cards properly?

[Chronon]

What revision are you using?  There was a recent commit having to do with SD handling for AMSv2 players (including the Fuze v2).

[noco]

I'm using a refurbished V2 with the newest firmware.

What do you mean with AMSv2? I now bought a new Clip+ and everythink seems to work fine so far

[yapper]

A V2 is an AMSv2.

Chronon was referring to the revision of Rockbox - are you running release 3.8, or a current build? If you were running 3.8, try a current build instead.

[noco]

I was running the stable 3.8 and now tried the latest build, but it did heat up as the 3.8. It looks like I have to go with the Clip+ which seems to work properly. Thanks for your help however!

[riseup]

Hello there,

I want to confirm on the heat issue.
I bought a refurbished Fuze (v2) and was very happy to see that I could use it also as a flashlight.
Until then I didn't experience any heat problems although I used it a lot, played games on it while listening to music (over quite a time) etc.

I didn't turn off the flashlight though and left it lying around for maybe 20 minutes.
After I touched it I realized that it got really hot and turned it off imediately.

Same story after it had cooled down, whenever the light of the scroll wheel was turned on, the backlight turned off.
Thanks to this thread I found out that with a permanently turned of light of the scroll wheel, the backlight works properly again.

I can live with a turned off ring light (although I liked it), but there are still some issues:

a) In my opinion, the battery has taken permanent damage, when charging the scale jumps around and even goes backwards, the capacity seems to be a lot lower (I am going to do a battery bench test and post the results later)

b) From time to time, the screen flickers.
Regarding the brightness: If I try to adjust it, I can only choose between 1 and 2 - all the other numbers don't change anything. I don't know though, whether this "bug" was induced by the heat or not because I did not try before.

Are there any new thoughts about that?
Has anyone actually tried to replace the battery?
Does anyone know whether I could get a new refurbished one based on guarantee issues? (I bought it via ebay from another country, so this option is quite a hassle for me, that's why I hesitate to do that)

As this is my first post in this forum, I also want to thank the whole team for the great work they have done. I really appreciate it!

For the manual, however, I think this issue should be covered to prevent further damage.

Greetings,
riseup

e: I am running the current build of RB.

[Chronon]

Regarding (a),  the battery meter does this anyway.  Take a look at any of the posted battery benchmarks.  Under varying load the voltage delivered by a battery will fluctuate.  So, observing this sort of behavior doesn't automatically indicate any problem.  battery_bench results will give a more objective indication of a problem, though it would be better if you had results from before you noticed any problems.

I'm not opposed to adding a cautionary note to the Fuze v2 manual.  It should probably mention that a small number of users have reported problems and briefly describe them.  You can always post an entry to the patch tracker if you want to hasten this.  The manual is written in LaTeX and a diff against the current manual code would be ideal, but you can also just post plain text that clearly indicates the desired change.

If you want to try replacing the battery there are some disassembly/tear-down pics linked in the wiki. 

[Zander]

Hello there,

I want to confirm on the heat issue.
I bought a refurbished Fuze (v2) and was very happy to see that I could use it also as a flashlight.
Until then I didn't experience any heat problems although I used it a lot, played games on it while listening to music (over quite a time) etc.

I didn't turn off the flashlight though and left it lying around for maybe 20 minutes.
After I touched it I realized that it got really hot and turned it off imediately.

Same story after it had cooled down, whenever the light of the scroll wheel was turned on, the backlight turned off.
Thanks to this thread I found out that with a permanently turned of light of the scroll wheel, the backlight works properly again.

I can live with a turned off ring light (although I liked it), but there are still some issues:

a) In my opinion, the battery has taken permanent damage, when charging the scale jumps around and even goes backwards, the capacity seems to be a lot lower (I am going to do a battery bench test and post the results later)

b) From time to time, the screen flickers.
Regarding the brightness: If I try to adjust it, I can only choose between 1 and 2 - all the other numbers don't change anything. I don't know though, whether this "bug" was induced by the heat or not because I did not try before.

Are there any new thoughts about that?
Has anyone actually tried to replace the battery?
Does anyone know whether I could get a new refurbished one based on guarantee issues? (I bought it via ebay from another country, so this option is quite a hassle for me, that's why I hesitate to do that)

As this is my first post in this forum, I also want to thank the whole team for the great work they have done. I really appreciate it!

For the manual, however, I think this issue should be covered to prevent further damage.

Greetings,
riseup

e: I am running the current build of RB.

I can confirm this too, but I didn't use the flash light I just maxed the brightness.

I recently brought another 8GB sansa fuze v2 (marked down from 89.99 to 25.99). I will install rock box on it, but I'm thinking that I will try to change the source code for the brightness so I can only go as high as 8 as opposed to the 25 levels normally you get in rock box.

I just need to know, what language is rock box coded in?

[Chronon]

It's written in C (with bits of assembly in certain places).

[saratoga]

Would capping it at 20 be enough?  Or should it be less?

[nexekho]

I'm very sorry for the bump, but this is important.

I managed to get my Fuze replaced not long after my previous posts, and I was wondering if the issue had been diagnosed and fixed so I looked and saw the V2 was considered "stable".  I look through this thread and notice nobody knows what's actually causing it or has fixed the issue.  If a basic power management problem exists under this firmware and not the stock firmware, then the problem is quite obviously with this firmware.  Perhaps some devices are "lucky" or exist in a colder climate so the problem is less apparent.  It doesn't matter.  And even though several people have had their devices ruined by Rockbox, you've pushed it up to stable.  Now I appreciate all the work you put in.  Rockbox is fantastic.  But it's irresponsible to have a fairly lengthy discussion from which I can draw the conclusion "It'll quite possibly kill your Fuze V2 through normal use" ignored.  Most of the posts of which are less than a few months old.

You cannot be serious about marking it stable if this isn't fixed.

[yapper]

I've been using a 4GB v2 Fuze for some months with no problems. I have the wheel light timeout set to 2 seconds, backlight set On and brightness set to 14. I've used it for extended periods outdoors in 90 degrees F plus temperatures and haven't observed any unusual heating issues.

There was a change made in May that reduced the maximum brightness setting to 20.

EDIT: OF V02.03.33A allows the brightness to be adjusted over 12 steps. I have no way of knowing if their steps correspond to Rockbox's 1-12 or maybe 5-16 ...

[nexekho]

I can't see anything in the change logs?  I'd consider "brightness capped to prevent permanent damage" more important than say "Remove track-number generation heuristic from database".  And just choosing a seemingly arbitrary number to cap the brightness at doesn't sound like a solution.  If I can have my brightness on full on original firmware, but we can't have it on Rockbox without blowing your device's power supply, it smells as if there's another more serious bug lurking and capping the brightness is just a sticking plaster.

[[Saint]]

I don't happen to consider having the screen brightness maxed out for extended periods "normal use", also, it was not promoted to stable *after* this was discovered either. It was marked as stable well before then if I remember correctly.

This is also not something that is happening with all of these devices, mine for instance are fine and I see no overheating.

The developers cannot be help responsible for testing every single circumstance that may arise in the usage of the device, as what is "normal" usage to you may not be to them.
To many people these are audio players, not flashlights or ways to play Doom etc. etc.

The developers also can't (nor should they) drop a port from stable to unstable based on problems that only a few devices are seeing. If that was the case then there would be very few ports (if any) that were "stable".

There have been limits set to (hopefully) prevent this overheating issue, but that's not to say that there are not as yet unknown variants of the hardware that will still be damaged by these new "safe" settings.

Also, you must consider that this is *free* software, and under no guarantee whatsoever, it is a conscious decision you are making to install it and if your device is damaged or left in a completely bricked state after installation or usage normal or otherwise then that falls on you and not the Rockbox team.


[St.]