Battery not loading (Novena Laptop)

Ah cool I didn't know this was possible. Is there any documentation for that?
This is the output:

stats
Manufacturer:       Texas Inst.
Part name:          bq20z95
Firmware version:   0x5009
Charge FET:         on
Discharge FET:      off
State:              battery failure
Time until full:    65535 minutes
Time until empty:   65535 minutes
Chemistry:          LION
Serial number:      0x0001
Charge:             0%
Max capacity:       6038 mAh
Design capacity:    5000 mAh
Temperature:        22.24357 C
Voltage:            7272 mV
Current:            0 mA
Average current:    0 mA
Target voltage:     12600 mV
Target current:     0 mA
Number of cells:    3 cells
Cell 1 voltage:     2947 mV
Cell 2 voltage:     2215 mV
Cell 3 voltage:     2111 mV
Cell 4 voltage:     0 mV
Charge status:      0x2001
    Charging allowed?   yes
    Can suspend?        no
    Can precharge?      yes
    Can maintenance?    no
    Temperature limit?  no
    Temperature limit?  no
    Can fastcharge?     no
    Pulse charging?     no
    Pulse disable CHG?  no
    Cell balancing?     no
    Precharge timeout?  no
    Fastcharge timeout? no
    Overcharge OV?      no
    Overcharge OC?      no
    Overcharge?         no
    Battery empty?      yes
Alarms:
    TERMINATE DISCHARGE ALARM
    REMAINING CAPACITY ALARM
Charge state:
    Battery initialized
    Battery discharging/relaxing
    Battery fully discharged
No errors detected
No safety alerts
Safety status:
    Pack undervoltage condition
    Cell undervoltage condition

The pack has gone into cell undervoltage lockout.  The charge FET is enabled, which means it can theoretically charge, and the discharge FET is disabled.

That is to be expected, as it is very, very low.  Dangerously low, in fact.  It shouldn't have been possible to get that low.  I don't know that it's safe to charge, but cell voltages are above 1.7V, so it might still be okay.  At least there are lots of protections in place.

The thing is, the gas gauge is telling the charger to not charge at all.  Which is why it isn't charging.

You can try one of two things.  First, try turning on IT.  Run "gg it".  See if that doesn't turn on the CHG FET.

Secondly, try manually charging things.

chg pause
chg set 256 12600
[wait fifteen seconds]
stats
chg resume

Give that about fifteen seconds, then check "stats" again.

When it comes to electricity-illiterate folks like me I think some clarification between 'dangerously' and 'critically' low needs to be made.

The eDP chip gets warm, not hot. I think the rule is that lifetime is cut in half for every 10°C, but it's cool enough I'm not terribly concerned (though it IS kind of annoying to know it's chewing up power).

What I think happened is this:

1) You discharged the battery to 0%
2) The mainboard shut off
3) The battery went below 9V
4) The battery board noticed this, and cut off power to the mainboard
5) The Senoko CPU stayed on, and drew about 8 mA of current (which is normal)
6) This was enough to cause the battery to drain below 7V, which caused the gas gauge to shut off power to the Senoko CPU (https://github.com/xobs/senoko-chibios- … o/gg.c#L51)
7) By the time you plugged it in again, it didn't want to do a deeply-discharged charge cycle.

I think the solution is to increase the shutdown_voltage to around 8.5V rather than 7V.  This will require loading new firmware onto Senoko (which we were planning on doing anyway.)

So the Senoko battery board DOES stay active all the time even the operating system is shut down? If yes is this a special feature of the lenovo laptop or is this also implemented in "standard" laptops? Having a 5000 mAh Battery would lead to a complete discharge in 26 days without doing anything. I wonder I have to shut the battery board down if I want to have total 0 A usage for the whole Laptop.

What is the reason that it needs to remain active when the whole system is off?

It needs to monitor the power button.  It also needs to control the charger, which needs to have values written to it at least once every 300 seconds or else it will stop charging.

I've always assumed 8mA is the consumption of the entire board.  Which is why you can see 8mA of current draw when not charging (use 'gg deadband 1').  But it could just be a calibration error, which is why the "deadband" command exists at all.

I don't believe the STM32 is entering sleep mode.  We had that working a while ago, but encountered problems.  Now that the system is more stable, I'll re-enable it.

Lots of bugfixes to push out in a new Senoko version.