OESF Portables Forum

Everything Else => Sharp Zaurus => Model Specific Forums => Distros, Development, and Model Specific Forums => Archived Forums => 6000 - Tosa => Topic started by: DrWowe on May 03, 2004, 09:02:10 pm

Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: DrWowe on May 03, 2004, 09:02:10 pm
Last night, I left my Z on, and not plugged in.  I didn\'t worry too much about it because I figured the auto-shut off would take care of it.  This morning, when I tried to turn it on, it wouldn\'t.  I plugged it in and the charging light came on, but it still wouldn\'t turn on.  So I hit the reset button.  No joy.  Then I removed the battery and the power cord, turned the backup battery switch off, left it like that for a minute, plugged everything back in, and turned it on again.  Still nothing.  Getting a little panicky, I hit the reset switch like 50 times in a row, with various combinations of other buttons pressed, still the machine remained dark.

Leaving it plugged in for a while, thinking about sending it back to Amazon, I went away for a while.  I came back a half hour later, and it started up and went through the boot sequence.  I unplugged it for a moment and saw that the battery was pretty much drained.

I draw two conclusions from this:

1)  Don\'t rely on auto-shutoff.  It doesn\'t work.
2)  The 6000 can\'t start up if the battery is drained.  Even when plugged in.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: Ethereal on May 03, 2004, 09:23:37 pm
Quote
1)  Don\'t rely on auto-shutoff.  It doesn\'t work.


Not to insult your intelligence, but are you sure all the power management stuff was configured correctly?  If so, this is not a trivial issue: a high-end battery-operated device with no fail-safe for preventing an inadvertently dead battery?
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: piggity on May 03, 2004, 09:44:20 pm
I had the same issue as \"2) The 6000 can\'t start up if the battery is drained. Even when plugged in.\" with a C860.  I let the battery go completly dead, plugged it in and it wouldn\'t start up for about 10 minutes.  After the batter charged for about ten minutes it turned on.  But it would not turn on being plugged into the wall with a dead battery.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: piggity on May 03, 2004, 09:45:02 pm
my point was a wouldn\'t worry to much about it, unless it happens when the batter isn\'t completly dead.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: xamindar on May 03, 2004, 11:42:22 pm
I remimber the manual for my 5600 also saying that the Z will not turn on if the battery is dead, even if it is plugged in.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: zbones on May 04, 2004, 04:13:55 am
This is a common way that others have permanently bricked their Z\'s.
Let it run down and then in a state of panick when it will not power up they attempt to reflash it with low power.

If your Z, (any model) fails to turn on, plug in the charger and leave it for 30 mins or so, then try and turn it on.

This is not unique to the Zaurus, my phone, camera, and camcorder all do this if the battery has been allowed to run down completely.

If the Z has to shutdown because of low power then it needs a charge fairly soon as the suspended state also uses power.

The best option is to set it to suspend when not used for ten mins or so.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: DrWowe on May 04, 2004, 05:05:33 am
Quote
The best option is to set it to suspend when not used for ten mins or so.


Yup, I have that setting.  But it apparently didn\'t work.  I don\'t know why.  I\'m going to do some testing of this feature at some point.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: jerbell on May 04, 2004, 08:41:15 pm
My 6000 has also failed to suspend.  It turned off when the battery drained and then turned on with no problems after I pluged it in.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: maslovsky on May 05, 2004, 06:57:38 am
Recall which apps you have recentely installed  - they might have broken suspend for you
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: cvmiller on May 05, 2004, 12:26:38 pm
Quote
Recall which apps you have recentely installed  - they might have broken suspend for you


This may not be an App problem, but a Wireless Interface problem.

I had the same experience, left my SL-6000 on (with the wireless connected to my home network), and walked off and forgot about it. Came back and the battery was totally drained, and the SL-6000 wouldn\'t start.

However, when I am at work, with the wireless interface off, my Z suspends just fine.

Anyone else notice that the battery draining experience was with the wireless interface ON?

Craig...
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: DrWowe on May 05, 2004, 12:32:23 pm
Wireless interface was on in my case.  In fact, I think I had a ping running.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: benkrembs on May 05, 2004, 08:32:50 pm
I noticed the same behavior on mine yesterday -- if the network is on, it doesn\'t suspend.

Kinda sucks, really... it\'s not like it doesn\'t suspend when a little low-power app is running, but when a power-hungry component is on.  That makes the problem much more annoying.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: treke on May 05, 2004, 09:02:59 pm
Quote
I had the same issue as \"2) The 6000 can\'t start up if the battery is drained. Even when plugged in.\" with a C860.  I let the battery go completly dead, plugged it in and it wouldn\'t start up for about 10 minutes.  After the batter charged for about ten minutes it turned on.  But it would not turn on being plugged into the wall with a dead battery.


This is sort of a feature. The device wakes up, notices that it\'s horribly low on power, and goes right back to sleep again before doing things like turning the LCD back on. I dont know how hard it would be to pull that bit of code out of the kernel, but it\'s probably doable. Cant see it being all that helpful though
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: benkrembs on May 06, 2004, 08:00:15 am
Well.. that \'Refusing To Start Unless The Battery Is Sorta Full\' feature is probably a Good Thing.  It probably helps make sure the battery doesn\'t get hammered really hard when it\'s low on power, things like that tend to royally screw up the battery\'s lifetime.

The real problem is the fact that the device doesn\'t sleep when the network is connected.  If you\'re going to dig into the kernal for anything... one should look into fixing that bug.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: gnarlog on May 07, 2004, 12:59:24 am
I too have a C860 with a totally drained battery. What really compounds my problem though is the fact that my Zaurus won\'t charge the battery for some reason. I\'ve tried different AC adapters, and even bought a replacement battery which worked briefly since the battery happened to have a little bit of charge, but I\'m once again in a position where I simply can\'t do anything with the machine except get to the service menus. On page 2, item 10 in the service menu, there is the \"power\" option. I clicked it, and it was set of \"off\". I set it on \"on\', and the battery charge light turned on, and stayed on until I turned it off again. I left it like that overnight, but it didn\'t charge the battery. Anyone have any similar experience? And does anyone know of a comprehensive document that covers the service menus?

Thanks,

Matt
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: Prowler on May 11, 2004, 09:35:52 pm
Hi, I\'m brand new to the forums, trying to decide on the 6000 or the 860, but wanted to comment on this one...

Quote
The real problem is the fact that the device doesn\'t sleep when the network is connected.  If you\'re going to dig into the kernal for anything... one should look into fixing that bug.


I don\'t know that I\'d consider this a problem.  It\'s a common feature on all handhelds that I\'ve seen.  If you have an active network adapter one would assume that you wouldn\'t want it to sleep for some reason (i.e., you may have some file transfer going on or waiting for that important email, etc.)  It is assumed that if you are done with the network feature, especially if you\'re on battery power, you\'d turn off that power hungry adapter to conserve battery.

I\'d certainly hate to be in the middle of transferring Paris\' latest video and have the transfer aborted because I hadn\'t touched anything on the device in the last 10 minutes.    

Just my couple cents-worth.
Title: My 6000 bricked, temporarily
Post by: LilMikey on May 24, 2004, 10:12:39 pm
IIRC from my dpreview camera surfing days people were talking about Li-Ion batterys becoming completely useless if they are ever 100% drained... as in the hold no usable charge.  It\'s like the achillies heel in an otherwise superior battery technology.  The shutoff sounds like a safegaurd to prevent the battery from being used as even charge detection = usage.

Although, I may just be talking out my rear as I haven\'t been to those forums in a while and I\'m too lazy to do so now