• Registered: 2014-06-15
  • Posts: 146

Topic: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

I'll preface this by once again noting that I may have broken stuff during my Senoko assembly. Hardware problems are possible.

That said, anybody else have issues with their Novena turning itself on when powered by the Senoko? Here's what happens:

Plug in Senoko + batteries -> Novena doesn't turn on (this is my recollection, and I can't check right now)

Add AC adapter -> Novena turns on, no button press required

(Can use Novena as usual)

Tell Novena to shut down (menu entry) -> Novena shuts down

(some time passes- a minute, maybe)

Novena turns itself on again


Powering it off by holding the power button seems to shut it down, but it keeps coming back on.

Anybody else experiencing this? It doesn't seem to happen with the passthrough board, and seems to happen regardless of whether I leave the AC adapter plugged in.

  • Registered: 2014-06-12
  • Posts: 100

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

Yup, I'm definitely having the same issue - now that I've got a battery in my Novena it's been drained twice in as many days. The first time even pulled a cell down to 2.8V (!!!!)

  • Registered: 2014-06-12
  • Posts: 100

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

I wonder if it's the watchdog reset that the senoko goes through every so often: novena is shut down, senoko restarts and comes up in an incorrect state, turning the novena back on.

I'm currently running the latest version of the senoko firmware which lists a fix for the i2c issue, but the reboots still happen - this time without an assert message.

  • Registered: 2015-02-20
  • Posts: 29

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

gg auto 0 stopped the random senoko reboots for me - you mgiht want to try that too. I'm on the latest senoko firmware too.

  • Registered: 2014-06-12
  • Posts: 100

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

That seems to have improved things! It shut down properly for once, and hasn't turned back on yet.

gg auto should probably be removed from the firmware; I don't think there's any valid reason to turn it on now (since the senoko does the charger management manually.)

  • Registered: 2014-06-12
  • Posts: 100

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

When I checked my unit this morning it was still off with a full battery. Looks like that was it.

I've updated my senoko firmware fork to remove the gg auto command and ensure it is off when the charger thread starts up; I'll send xobs a pull request once I've built and tested it this evening.

  • Registered: 2014-06-15
  • Posts: 146

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

Probably unnecessary, but I'll chime in to add that this seems to work for me as well.

For educational purposes what exactly does that do? I guess "gg auto 1" gives the gas gauge control to run things, and it gets confused when things shut down? Whereas "gg auto 0" has the Cortex M3 (or M0, or whatever it is) controlling things?

  • Registered: 2014-06-12
  • Posts: 100

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

That's pretty much it - the gas gauge can send I2C commands to the charger itself, but we don't want it to since the senoko charger thread does that for us.

It looks like when auto is on, occasionally the gauge and senoko conflict with each other, and the senoko ends up doing an uncontrolled reboot, which causes it to default to the On state.

Stopping the random reboots helps with the problem, but there needs to be a bit more logic in there to determine what the default state should be (e.g. default to off if on battery only, etc). Until that's written it shouldn't be considered completely fixed yet.

Xobs saw my previous post and went and updated his fork with my commits (there's also one to allow running from a 2S battery), so the auto changes are in his branch now. I don't *think* it's a problem (most of the changes are just deletions), but I can't test it until I get home from work smile

  • xobs
  • Administrator
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  • Registered: 2014-05-25
  • Posts: 442

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

Thanks for the pull requests.

There was a time where we weren't sure what would drive the battery charger, and I was throwing in all possible commands.  That's how a lot of the temperature commands got in there, too.  But for the most part, you're right, setting "auto 0" is the way to go.

  • Registered: 2014-06-12
  • Posts: 100

Re: Novena spontaneously turns on with Senoko board

Oh yeah, I've been there plenty of times during new hardware bringup smile

Anyway, raised a new pull request with a fix for that commit you grabbed a little prematurely. I'm sure you'd like your branch to actually compile again... smile