Various Senoko oddities (Page 1 of 3)

Ok, lets tackle the simple ones first. The LCD weirdness is a known problem and is being worked on; at this point if it comes up in the bad state just reboot. Backlight bleed is because the bolts holding the lcd in are tightened too much. Yes, even if they're unacceptably loose. Check the bezel and ensure it's actually flat (my green one had a bad bow in it). Then, putting washers between the bezel and the lcd apparently helps.

Your battery is in good condition; all three cells are above 3000mA. The gas gauge is confused, though, with that 0% charge level (although everything else in that status output is fine). In the senoko console, try resetting the cell configuration, which will also reset a bunch of other internal settings:

gg cells 3
gg capacity 3 5000

Short version: All the Senoko issues haven't repeated yet since some other work I did last night, but they were erratic before, so I'm trying the other ideas too and will report back with any other oddities. Thanks!

Details:

Late last night, I tried something else: pulling all the power and plugging it back in while holding down the reflash button. That seems to have made it happier so far, but I'm trying these other commands now just to force the issue.

xobs: "chg" did show a slightly lower input before:

Charger information:
        Charge thread:    running
        Manufacturer ID:  0x0040
        Device ID:        0x0007
        Current:          4992 mA
        Voltage:          12592 mV
        Input:            3328 mA

After "chg input 3750", it's reporting an input of 3584 mA.

pelrun: I tried your commands too, though those look to have been the configured values already, but if they clear more bad state out, all the better.

Oh and the behavior where the power light stays on when I shut the machine down seems to be back. Not sure if that indicates any sort of failure during the shutdown process.

Apologies for potentially threadjacking (let me know if I should start a new one), but mine is having a very similar problem. (Don't think I've ever been able to run on battery power, either before or after updating the Senoko firmware.)

Already tried a

gg reboot

which didn't do much other than clear the permanent-failure flag (so I didn't try running

gg pfreset

on top of it), but otherwise I've got one cell that claims to be at 0 mV and two others that claim to be at about 57400 mV.

ch> stats
Manufacturer:       Texas Inst.
Part name:          bq20z95
Firmware version:   0x150
Charge FET:         off
Discharge FET:      off
State:              battery failure
Time until full:    65535 minutes
Time until empty:   0 minutes
Chemistry:          LION
Serial number:      0x0001
Cycle count:        1
Battery health:     98%
Charge:             0%
Max capacity:       4856 mAh
Design capacity:    5000 mAh
Temperature:        32.7 C
Voltage:            49264 mV
Current:            -9 mA
Average current:    -9 mA
Target voltage:     0 mV
Target current:     0 mA
Number of cells:    3 cells
Cell 1 voltage:     0 mV
Cell 2 voltage:     57391 mV
Cell 3 voltage:     57410 mV
Cell 4 voltage:     0 mV
Charge status:      0x1
    Charging allowed?   yes
    Can suspend?        no
    Can precharge?      no
    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 CHARGE ALARM
    TERMINATE DISCHARGE ALARM
    REMAINING CAPACITY ALARM
    REMAINING TIME 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
ch> 

Not sure about manoj's setup, but my balancing taps do look fully seated.

I haven't done any `gg cal`. Early on, I tried the `chg set` routine xobs mentioned here, and I tried using the on/off button on Senoko at one point before I learned about `gg reboot`, but that was about it.

I'm not by my Novena at the moment, but I can double-check the balance connector this evening (GMT-4)--like I said, they look properly connected, but I'll unplug/replug later today.

The +TX connectors are actually for temperature sensing. The balance connector is the smaller 4-pin one on the side of the senoko board, furthest away from the novena board.

No change, unfortunately. So if I assume my battery's dead (whether we chalk it up to the earlier firmware or not), what should I look for in a new battery, and how should I let Senoko know what's happened once I've installed it?

Or you can measure between adjacent pins and get the cell voltages directly (between pins 1-2 is cell 1, pins 2-3 is cell 2, pins 3-4 is cell 3).

The big thing to look at when getting batteries from HobbyKing is the width - you need them to be <=18mm thick if you want them to fit in the case with the lid shut. The battery finder tool on the HobbyKing site lets you set this, just change Width(C) to be between 0-18mm.

The biggest battery I could find that fits is a 2S 8000mAh one (57600mWh, roughly equivalent capacity to a 3S 5300mAh), link below. You'd need to cut the balance connector off it and use the one from your old battery, leave the extra pin disconnected. Configure senoko with "gg capacity 2 8000".

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/stor … duct=16224

It's biggest in capacity and size, though, pretty much eats up the entire peek array. You might want to settle for a smaller 3S battery instead.

Took a while to get back to it, but I just checked my balancing tap. It looked properly connected, but I reseated it just in case, and now I'm seeing more reasonable numbers (below). I didn't run any of the suggested commands. Did just reseating the balancing tap fix everything, was it the prolonged period of being unplugged, or something else? This is rather weird.

Manufacturer:       Texas Inst.
Part name:          bq20z95
Firmware version:   0x150
Charge FET:         on
Discharge FET:      on
State:              charge
Time until full:    21 minutes
Time until empty:   65535 minutes
Chemistry:          LION
Serial number:      0x0001
Cycle count:        1
Battery health:     96%
Charge:             95%
Max capacity:       4772 mAh
Design capacity:    5000 mAh
Temperature:        25.3 C
Voltage:            12497 mV
Current:            1570 mA
Average current:    1461 mA
Target voltage:     12600 mV
Target current:     5000 mA
Number of cells:    3 cells
Cell 1 voltage:     4159 mV
Cell 2 voltage:     4181 mV
Cell 3 voltage:     4156 mV
Cell 4 voltage:     0 mV
Charge status:      0x240
    Charging allowed?   yes
    Can suspend?        no
    Can precharge?      no
    Can maintenance?    no
    Temperature limit?  no
    Temperature limit?  no
    Can fastcharge?     yes
    Pulse charging?     no
    Pulse disable CHG?  no
    Cell balancing?     in-progress
    Precharge timeout?  no
    Fastcharge timeout? no
    Overcharge OV?      no
    Overcharge OC?      no
    Overcharge?         no
    Battery empty?      no
Alarms:
Charge state:
    Battery initialized
No errors detected
No safety alerts
No safety status messages

Well, apparently I didn't unplug the balancing connector as far as I thought I had the last time. (I knew it wasn't all the way, but I'd never seen the JST-XH connectors before and didn't want to force it when it wasn't moving very much on my first attempt. They look more fragile than they actually are (a feeling I tend to get whenever I see JST-style connectors), and I tend to be reluctant to use anything metal around connectors for lithium-ion batteries in particular when I can avoid it, just in case something slips and accidentally shorts pins that really shouldn't be shorted.)

That said, I completely unplugged it, saw all the expected voltages (about 4 volts per cell), sat confused for a moment about all this, and then plugged it back in, and all seems well. So you guys were right the first time, I don't have to buy a new battery, and I learned more about a new (to me) connector! Sorry for the run-around earlier.

I ended up with mine in a similar state while playing with the calibration at one point. Recalibrating it (after checking connections were solid etc.) did fix it, but I wonder if it might be quicker for you to just reimport xobs's senoko data dump to get back to a known good state?

Reflash as in the update-senoko script? I've generally had trouble with that too (as mentioned above). It succeeded once, but every other time I've tried it (including just now, most of the script proceeds, but it gets stuck in the loop waiting for the board to appear on i2c:

# Wait for the board to show up on I2C
while ! /usr/sbin/i2cget -f -y 0 0x20 0 2> /dev/null > /dev/null
do
    echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio149/value
    echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio149/value
done

When I try that i2cget command on my own I get "Error: Read failed", and when I strace that:

open("/dev/i2c/0", O_RDWR)              = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/dev/i2c-0", O_RDWR)              = 3
ioctl(3, 0x705, 0xbe920640)             = 0
ioctl(3, 0x706, 0x20)                   = 0
ioctl(3, 0x720, 0xbe920640)             = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
close(3)                                = 0
write(2, "Error: Read failed\n", 19Error: Read failed
)    = 19