Electron Charging?

Troubleshooting
21

Yup that is it. I have looked at the pins with a 10x loupe before and everything looked fine but when I look at the inside I can see a very small piece of plastic missing from between two pads. I would not recognize anything wrong unless I compare it to my photon.

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22

Thatā€™s excellent. Thanks for taking a peek in there! Sending you a PM.

23

I have two electrons, and neither of them seem to be charging the battery. The red LED has been on for days, and when I unplug it from USB it dies within a hour or so.

It might be the USB power block I have them plugged into, but itā€™s capable of high output.

When I find some time Iā€™ll try a different supply.

24

As a quick test, I put it on a USB meter on an iPad supply. Only drawing 70mA.

image.jpeg3024Ɨ4032 2.09 MB

25

At the standard charging rate of 500mA the LED will shut off when the charging drops to 1/10c which is 50mA.

Jiggle the JST connector a little and see if the charging LED shuts off. I have done this in the past when the charging LED seemed to be not shutting off as soon as expected, sometimes the connection is just not that good and causes voltage readings to be inaccurate which causes the charging to take longer.

26

That USB cable looks a bit thin. Can you try a better quality cable?

You could also try to put your Electron into soft power down by double tapping the SETUP button to see if the charging circuit works at all.

27

I tried reseating the JST connector, and swapping USB cables. No change.

28

I double tapped MODE and it shut down. As you can see the red charge LED is still on, but measured current is below 10mA.

Iā€™ll pull out my scope and check batt voltage.

image.jpeg4032Ɨ3024 1.84 MB

29

I am also experiencing similar results. However my battery does go to about 80%. Red led never turns off even after 12 hours of charging. The SOC level never goes above 80%

I tried changing cables, adapters with no change.

30

Iā€™m seeing something similar as well. Had the Electron charging via USB all night and this morning the red LED was off (it was on when charging started) but the charge state is only at 83% and 3.99 volts according to the Electronā€™s internal FuelGauge. The red LED wonā€™t light up anymore. Even when I disconnect and reconnect the USB cable. I was on 0.4.8.

UPDATE: Iā€™ve upgraded to firmware 0.5.0 and disconnected both the battery and USB and reconnected them. Now the red LED is burning again. Not sure however what caused it.

UPDATE 2: Iā€™m seeing the exact same behaviour as with the 0.4.8 firmware now that I am on 0.5.0. The red LED goes off while the FuelGauge indicates the battery is only at 83%. I checked the actual voltage with a multimeter through the Li+ pin and it gives 4.01 volts. So its indeed not fully charged.

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31

@frlobo have you had any success charging your Electron to 100%? Mine is still not charging much above 80% :frowning:

32

I read a while ago that @BDub was about to update some docs regarding this 80% ā€œissueā€ (which seems to be a default safety barrier which could be ā€œunlocked by informed concentā€)
But I canā€™t find the update - maybe Brett could provide a link.

33

Thanx @ScruffR, I found these pages:

https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/electron/#charge-voltage-control-reg

From these pages I've distilled the following code:

PMIC pmic;

and then in setup():

pmic.setChargeVoltage(4208);

or for safe mode:

pmic.setChargeVoltage(4112);

This works like a charm!

34

I do recall that thread (post #2 :wink: ) and also the docs, but as I understood Brett there should be some more info than just the function prototypes :sunglasses:

35

Ok, if there is more information on the subject, Iā€™d love to get my hands on it!

36

Nopeā€¦ I tried with a 4AMP charger and did not work. Never goes above 85%. And red light always stays on.

I will try the PMIC solution. Just hoping to understand how the settings work to know what should I be concerned with. Why 4208 works and not 4112ā€¦ Also Should I set this every boot, or only once?

37

This refered to my comment that @BDub might have some extra info put together already but just not publushed yet (or I'm just too blind to find it)

38

Just put it in setup(). Thatā€™s what works for me. I have only tried 4208 so far. But I believe 4112 is the default setting. The FuelGauge gives a lower voltage than what I measure with a multimeter. So the actual voltage is a bit higher than what FuelGauge says.

But in my case the red LED always turns off. It just turned off before reaching 100%; which is now solved. So your case might be different than mine.

39

I've asked Brett now for that info, and he pointed me to this "backlog" entry

So there will be more, but might need some time :wink:

But that entry also contains a valid warning!

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40

Also Iā€™d like to caution you guys @nodemand @frlobo @wtfuzz @RWB @kbowerma that there was a bug discovered in 0.5.0 and 0.4.8-rc.6 for the Electron where the 4208 setting would actually set the battery cutoff voltage to 4.4V which is much too high. Luckily the supplied battery has a protection circuit but any non-protected battery could be at risk of overcharge if you had used this function. This has been fixed on 0.5.1, so feel free to use the 4208 setting to achieve around 94% charge.

// ONLY use on 0.5.1 system firmware or higher
void setup() {
    PMIC power;
    power.setChargeVoltage(4208);
}

Be sure to keep your battery temps under 45Ā°C though. The % reading is based on the Fuel Gauge measurement, which is independent from the PMIC charging, which is why it will never be exactly 100%. Itā€™s either going to be a bit under, or over. Iā€™d prefer to error on the under side for safety, and I understand why 100% is desirable and intuitive to say ā€œfully chargedā€. There might even be a way to set the Fuel Gauge to programmatically expect a lower termination voltage, so we can show 100%. Will add that to my list :wink:

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