Bricked?

Werner Almesberger werner at openmoko.org
Wed Apr 25 00:38:30 CEST 2007


Christopher Heiny wrote:
> I think I've done something awful to my Neo.

No, you've just emptied the battery :-)

If you have a means to recharge the battery from an external source,
I'd recommend you try that. If you have a battery that is compatible
in size, polarity, and voltage, you could use it to bring up the phone
and update u-boot. That in turn should allow you to charge the
original battery in the Neo.

The problem is basically that, if using an old version of u-boot, the
phone powers up if you connect a charger and the battery is very weak,
and then tries to start. During this, the power needed will exceed what
it can draw from USB. It then takes power from the already empty
battery, which will sooner and later, run out. That was the flickering
boot splash screen your coworkers saw. The phone will (un)happily
continue with this, but after a while it won't even make it to the
point where the backlight is turned on, so you don't see the screen.

All the gory details can be found here:
http://bugzilla.openmoko.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=212
(For the solution, you can skip right to the end.)

- Werner

-- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina     werner at almesberger.net /
/_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/



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