battery life

[darrenjthompson]

Alexandre

Thank you for investigating this and coming up with a solution.
What about us timid/"ham fingered" types who are reluctant to go near the main-board with a soldering iron?
Is there so way we could get this done by AI on our behalf?

Darren

We just published two solutions for this top battery issue on the wiki: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/in ... arging_fix

You may want to take a look.

Best,
Alexandre - Always Innovating Team

[darrenjthompson]

I live in Australia and this seems like a perfectly viable/fair approach to me.
I would even be prepared to pay a small fee for the repair work.

I would love to see ai offer a replacement option as a possibility instead of these hack repairs.
As an example:
AI could take my credit card number and send me a working new/reconditioned board.
I install it and send back my old board to be reconditioned for the next person.
If you don't recieve my old board after a given time (30/60 days?) you charge my credit card for the new/reconditioned board.

[seaogre]

Here's some pictures of my hack:
http://a.ntzk.dk/TB/CIMG2861.JPG
http://a.ntzk.dk/TB/CIMG2863.JPG

I use a slightly different charger, It's more expensive, but a bunch of these came free with my dads new office. I think it has the exact same specs, except it has a bicolor led which is green for power and system on, orange for charging and green again for done charging. Very handy.

As you can see on the images I soldered the wires directly on to the batt +/- without cutting them. Then I cut the USB plug and soldered that to to the power port. That way I can always just disconnect the USB by hand is something isn't right.

I haven't tested it yet, but it seems to be working so far.

I have my doubts about the on-board system charging circuit, how it will handle this but my hopes are up. Does anyone have any idea how it works? I guess worst case scenario is both chargers charging the battery at the same time unaware of each other, overcharging and damaging the battery.

On a slightly related note, has anyone ever taken a TB on an international flight before?

To your last question first No, but I have carried a laptop and at the most they wanted to see it flash as coming on, booting up. Hope your battery is still "up". the good part is that you can open it's guts up for inspection far easier than I could my HP
laptop.
The second part is the link to your charger didn't seem to direct me to the source/part number of your charger. I have a smartfun lipo on order but would like to know what your charger is and how it is working.

[seaogre]

The would be ok since the stock top charger never fully charges. Ever Ever Ever. It would quit long before the battery is overcharged.

Since the top charger doesn't appear to work "well enough" could we not only replace the charger but also hook to the charging receptacle that the TB brick uses and just plug each half in each night?

[blackstag]

seagore i already did that with the spark fun breakout board mentioned earlier in this thread i believe. I have now done the fix suggested by AI for this and waiting to see if it works.

[andersonas25]

Well I pulled the sparkfun charger out. It looks like with 2010-9a update the upper battery is charging now. The battery upper gage is a little wonky. It reports 90% charge while the power adapter is plugged in. And it reports 50% charge while running on batteries, and never goes to zero. But I get about 10 hours total battery time, so I consider that nprogress. My TB already has the charging mod mentioned.

[Ollo]

Hi micker,

my batteries ran empty, too. So I am interesting in the charging setup you build.
Are your custom charger and the original charger both connected to the battery?
Could you please draw a wiring diagram?

Thx
Ollo

[darrenjthompson]

@AlwaysInnovating

Come on team, you could at-least reply to tell me why this is not a good option...

I'm currently "stuck" with a faulty V1 TB, I am VERY VERY VERY NOT KEEN to bugger it up by attemping a soldering/hack job myself.

Surely there has to be some reasonable way to get my unit fixed/replaced. I'm even prepared to PAY for a new board and/or the fix job if required (see my suggestion below).

I live in Australia and this seems like a perfectly viable/fair approach to me.
I would even be prepared to pay a small fee for the repair work.

I would love to see ai offer a replacement option as a possibility instead of these hack repairs.
As an example:
AI could take my credit card number and send me a working new/reconditioned board.
I install it and send back my old board to be reconditioned for the next person.
If you don't recieve my old board after a given time (30/60 days?) you charge my credit card for the new/reconditioned board.

[darrenjthompson]

It's now 8+ months later, I still have not heard why this is a bad idea...

@AlwaysInnovating

Come on team, you could at-least reply to tell me why this is not a good option...

I'm currently "stuck" with a faulty V1 TB, I am VERY VERY VERY NOT KEEN to bugger it up by attemping a soldering/hack job myself.

Surely there has to be some reasonable way to get my unit fixed/replaced. I'm even prepared to PAY for a new board and/or the fix job if required (see my suggestion below).

Failing that, I could always pay twice as much for one of the new ASUS Transformer Primes, At least I'll be able to get that to charge...

Darren

[freds_shadow]

Since it seems AI doesn't frequent the boards anymore you might try their Twitter account. At least that's shown a few signs of life 'recently'.

It's now 8+ months later, I still have not heard why this is a bad idea...

@AlwaysInnovating

Come on team, you could at-least reply to tell me why this is not a good option...

I'm currently "stuck" with a faulty V1 TB, I am VERY VERY VERY NOT KEEN to bugger it up by attemping a soldering/hack job myself.

Surely there has to be some reasonable way to get my unit fixed/replaced. I'm even prepared to PAY for a new board and/or the fix job if required (see my suggestion below).

Failing that, I could always pay twice as much for one of the new ASUS Transformer Primes, At least I'll be able to get that to charge...

Darren