iPod 5.5g No Battery!

[veemo]

Hello,

I recently purchased a 5.5g iPod (late 2006 video) and installed rockbox. Fully charged, I can listen normally in the Apple OS, but if I boot in Rockbox I get 2 minutes tops (more like 30 seconds) before the battery is "dead," even without anything playing and with battery-conserving settings. the player indicates a full battery when it boots, continues to display full battery, then shuts off. booting again in RB it immediately displays the "low battery, shutting down" warning, and shuts off again. I say "dead" because if I wait a while and boot again in apple OS it works fine again, so the battery is clearly not really dead. Has anyone experienced this before?

Thanks!

[dreamlayers]

Does the iPod

I recently purchased a 5.5g iPod (late 2006 video) and installed rockbox. Fully charged, I can listen normally in the Apple OS, but if I boot in Rockbox I get 2 minutes tops (more like 30 seconds) before the battery is "dead," even without anything playing and with battery-conserving settings. the player indicates a full battery when it boots, continues to display full battery, then shuts off.

Here, do you mean a sudden shutdown, without any indication that Rockbox is trying to shut down? Such a shutdown usually also leaves a faint after-image on the LCD. Does it happen exactly when Rockbox tries to shut down the hard drive? That moment has the highest power usage, even higher than spinup. The spike can cause voltage to drop so low that it goes below a programmable threshold at which hardware cuts power.

booting again in RB it immediately displays the "low battery, shutting down" warning, and shuts off again. I say "dead" because if I wait a while and boot again in apple OS it works fine again, so the battery is clearly not really dead. Has anyone experienced this before?

I don't know. I've experienced shutdowns due to the spike I mentioned. The only part which is different is you seeing a full battery in Rockbox at startup. The rest of what you describe is not consistent with that.

I suspect that your battery is very worn out and the original firmware is more tolerant to that. Maybe it lowers the hardware shutoff threshold during disk activity. I need to check that. Replacing the battery would probably fix the problem.

[veemo]

yes, sudden shut down as in "browsing through menus, battery says 90% full..." - BAM! gone.

I don't know, though, because I just listened to an entire John Scofield album without problem, it may just be when I'm playing with menus/settings.

[veemo]

Yeah, this seems to be related just to using menus. I listened for a few hours straight last night without playing with the menus, then as soon as I tried to queue up another album it crashed, again with the battery indicator showing >50%

[dreamlayers]

Maybe it happens in menus because the backlight is on then. It uses a lot of power when set to high brightness, and maybe that in addition to the hard drive's power usage is enough to trip the hardware undervoltage detection.

I was unable to confirm that the original firmware changes the BVMC threshold during normal operation. It seems only the diagnostic changes that, decreasing it to 3V when powering the disk. There still might be some processing going on that I'm not aware of, perhaps in response to the PCF interrupt.

I'm getting a new battery. They can be surprisingly inexpensive, although I'm not totally sure what sources are reputable. I ordered from richmondliu88 on eBay for US $3.99.

[doublea71]

Sounds a lot like what happened to my 5.5 today. I was playing music while charging it in an AC outlet and it suddenly switched off. When I switched it back on, it would play for a few seconds then do the same thing. I'm thinking the battery is just old. I'm going to see if I can get a new one tomorrow at a shop that replaced my scroll wheel...

[dreamlayers]

Maybe it wasn't really charging. There's a setting for enabling USB charging. Make sure that was correctly set. You can also view details about charging via the debug screen.

[[Saint]]

Maybe it wasn't really charging. There's a setting for enabling USB charging. Make sure that was correctly set. You can also view details about charging via the debug screen.

By my understanding, even when set to "off" the player will still draw 100mA.


[Saint]

[torne]

Yes, but you can exceed 100mA average drawn if the disk spins up often enough, and thus the overall effect will be to discharge, not charge, the battery.

You mentioned you were charging it with an AC outlet; we don't yet detect that kind of charger in Rockbox, which means you need to set this setting to "force" to make it actually charge from that.