Sooo... I may have blown up my battery.

[Timo Juhani Lindfors]

François-Léonard Gilbert <gilbertf at gmail.com> writes:
> 6) cycle the menu items for a few seconds
>
> result: the FR shuts down while I cycle the menu.

My uneducated guess is that it shuts down since it only draws 100 mA
from USB and the CPU + display consume more than that.

I was in the same situation a while ago and hacked together

http://iki.fi/lindi/openmoko/u-boot-force-charging1.patch

that modifies u-boot so that you can force charging at 500 mA. I the
turned baclight off, disabled u-boot timeout and waited in u-boot for
10 minutes. After that the battery had charged itself enough to boot
Linux.