neo won't turn on anymore

[Erik]

Yuck.  I was the one that emailed the list about my neo dying
recently, and then being revived by letting the thing sit unplugged
and without a battery overnight.

I've encountered three types of fault:

-1. The white-screen-of-death really hard crash where the screen and
 vibrator come on full blast.  The battery read 3.9 volts with an
 external meter, so this was not a low-battery fault.  This is the one
 that required ~6 hours with no battery.

-2. The battery-run-down crash, bringing it below the voltage needed to
 turn it back on, even with the usb cable attached.  Strange that the
 battery will run down even when attached to usb.  Seems to happen
 with the neo in suspend.  [in the future, don't try to turn it on so
 quickly after totally draining the battery... the neo sometimes takes
 more power than the usb can supply, so it's good to let it charge
 some before rebooting.]

-3. The screen-set-to-1% glitch, which is the most complicated to
 describe.  I only today figured out that this one is a screen
 brightness problem.  This one seems to happen after the neo has run
 itself into the ground and has come back on after recharging some.
 It seems to work fine for a while, but after the screen blanks, then
 next time the screen is awakened it comes back to full brightness [as
 normal] but then it dims to 25% brightness for a few seconds and then
 goes to 1% brightness... which is indistinguishable from totally
 black.  This one can be fixed by 
   echo 5194 > /sys/class/backlight/gta01-bl/brightness
 [obviously over usb or bluetooth.]


This last fault is the on that has most of my attention right now.
Anyone else seeing this one?


The circumstances of your neo's fault sound like you had glitch type
2, followed by glitch type 3.  And then maybe either type 1, or
hopefully possibly it just went back to glitch type 2.  Like Ted
suggests maybe it just got run down below its turn-on threshold again,
and a 20 minute / hour long usb emergency trickle charge will do it
good.

Don't rely on the battery status meter in the neo... 40% might be its
way of saying totally, totally dead.  I've found 3.6 volts is where my
battery falls off a cliff, voltage wise.


Good luck!!!

-erik