Boron CHG light flashing rapidly and not starting

Hardware
1

Hey All,

I have a Boron communicating with an Itsybitsy M0 over the I2C bus and everytime I power the boards up at the same time the boron CHG light starts flashing rapids and it will not start. If I start the Boron first and then start the M0 after everything comes up and they communicate correctly. Any thoughts on what would be preventing the Boron from starting? I know that the power ic and fuel gauge communicate over the I2C so I’m wondering if that is somehow related.

I really appreciate your input. Thank you!

2

It sounds like your power supply cannot supply enough current to start up both boards at once. The Boron charge light flashing indicates not enough charging current. Take a look at your power supply and consider increasing available current to the boards.

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3

Thank you for the suggestion. I think that I’ve been able to track down the issue. It seems to be related to a busy line that I had configured that was sending an output to a pin on the Boron. The same power supply has been used on other PCBs without issue. It is still somewhat of a mystery, but the issue hasn’t presented itself since the change. Hopefully at some point the U8G2 SOS issue will be resolved then I can remove the ItsyBitsy that is driving the display.

4

I’m actually having this exact issue (but with only the Boron – no 2nd board), I tried multiple power supplies but getting the same flashing orange charging light, nothing is plugged into the Boron, the onboard status LED is off, and I’ve tried the hardware reset steps with no success :confused:

Any other ideas?

5

@instincts, did you try connecting a battery to the Boron? The charge light will flicker if no battery is connected. Also, the Boron may not start up if the USB supply is not good quality/high enough current.

6

thanks for the speedy response @peekay123, I did try wiring in a 12V power supply into the VUSB pin while the GND was going out to the negative, which I read on here was safe with the Boron given the better onboard PMIC (i can find the link). The device successfully booted up and got connected to the mesh.

After that I tried plugging the Boron back into 110V wall supply, the same supply I’ve been using since its setup/claim a couple weeks ago, but now I just get the blinking CHG and the onboard status LED used for tinker.ino isn’t even turning on.

7

Ordering another device immediately because I don’t have time to waste, but really curious about solving this problem and avoiding in the future.

8

Just guessing, but maybe power supply has gone bad?

9

What was the 12V power supply - a bench power supply or something else?

Do you have a link or more data on that 110V wall supply? I have a suspicion it is not suitable. AGAIN I ask, have you tried plugging a LiPo battery in with this supply?

10

Hey @picsil, I don’t think so, I tried a second, newer, supply, even a different outlet

11

Not yet re: the LiPo, although I may have an extra one I can wire in from an old PAL radio.

And yes the the 12V power supply is bench supply, a Velleman LAB-1

12

And the 110V supply is a USB type-A cable (originally for a jawbone BT speaker) plugged into an Apple-issued wall brick (for a phone, not a tablet or PC)

13

@instincts, if I understand correctly, you have an Apple 110V wall brick powering the Boron via a USB cable, correct? Is the Boron a 2G/3G model or an LTE-M1 model? Have you tried a different USB cable?

14

And yes you are correct in your understanding. The Apple wall brick and Jawbone USB type-A cable are what have been powering this device for the last couple weeks during usage/testing. This is the LTE-M1 model, and yes I’ve tried 3x USB cables, 3x wall adapters, and 3x wall outlets

15

Btw thank you to everyone weighing in, I’ve had a great time working with this device so far, excellent engineering, great documentation, and great software & API. 2nd dev kit was just ordered now so I can get back to work ASAP, but hoping to learn what happened to this one

16

A little more context, I was hooking up the 12V supply in an attempt to configure something like this:

Essentially sending a 3.3V signal from a digitalWrite OUTPUT to the MOSFET gate, to turn the 12V motor on/off. I was able to get it working (using 2 different configurations), but was having an issue where the motor wouldn’t turn off but sorta trickle off, even with the 3.3V coming back to the Boron GND and the motor grounded to its power supply.

I was considering trying to run the Boron off the same 12V powers supply that the motor was running on, but I wanted to test the Boron and the 12V supply alone first, and that’s when I started getting the CHG light flashing orange.

17

@instincts, you should log a support ticket with Particle to resolve this issue, if not to fix it then to get a replacement.

18

Ok will do @peekay123, thanks again for weighing in

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19

Hello, I wonder if this issue is resolved. I recently got a Boron, start seeing the exact same issue. Thanks.

20

I recently ran into this issue when messing with the PMIC configs and this is how I solved it:

Use second power supply or LiPo to provide power to Li+ and GND, this should bring you back to a state where your Boron boots and loads the app so that you can apply a FW update. If using a power supply, set it to ~3.7V as if it were a single cell LiPo.

Insert this into your setup function:

    // To restore the default configuration
    SystemPowerConfiguration conf; 
    conf.feature(SystemPowerFeature::USE_VIN_SETTINGS_WITH_USB_HOST);
    System.setPowerConfiguration(conf);

Update the app FW with this and the issue should go away.

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