Here's A Funny One

[Karel Jansens]

As it says in the subject line: Last night, I hung my Panda on the charger for overnight juice, but weirdly it seemed to wake up from low power about 15 minutes into the charge and I had to re-standby it. An uneventful morning passed by, until I noticed that Panda arbitrarily stopped recognizing USB drives and then the battery level began to veer wildly from 98 to 24%, finally settling at the aforementioned Kafkian number of -121% (mind you, the status light was still happily green and the Panda never shut itself down).

Then the nubs stopped working. Taking out the battery, soft-resetting, nothing helped, until I decided to recalibrate the touchscreen (that was still responsive to touch), and presto! nubs worked again. About an hour later, the battery level decided to set itself to a realistic 94% and has been behaving exemplary since (hits wood).

I didn't do anything funky, just read a few books and comics and played a session of Meritous (which, very predictably, ended in it crashing, but that's been almost a constant the last couple of days.

 

[mali]

Sounds like the battery contacts might not have been aligned properly. A bit of padding on top of the battery before closing the compartment might help.

 

[Karel Jansens]

Sounds like the battery contacts might not have been aligned properly. A bit of padding on top of the battery before closing the compartment might help.

As I said, I did replace the battery. What I forgot to mention was that I did so several times, with the same result (Star Trek battery reading) every time.

I somehow find it hard to believe that I managed to misalign the battery each and every time and that it decided to spontaneously align itself correctly after an hour had passed...

 

[urjaman]

The I2C subsystem failed for some reason. Nubs and the battery gauge are connected using I2C. FYI strerror says that 121 is "Remote I/O error" (not 100% sure if the error codes are compatible, but IIRC in-kernel error codes should be just negated userspace error codes), but that doesnt tell much (the dmesg from the event would have been nice for the kernel devs, but I guess its already gone.). I had an -110% (Connection timed out.) event some day, was in a hurry so i just rebooted my pandora and it worked with that, wonder why your problem persisted.

So yeah the battery gauge should be coded with a bit more logic, now it just reads a number from a special file and reports that, even if its negative (meaning to report an error code, but OTOH its very easy to see the error if you know what is happening).

 

[WizardStan]

it's especially funny that calibrating the touchscreen was the thing that fixed it. Maybe some bad data got into a config file somewhere and even on reset that data was loaded and caused the I2C controller problems; calibrating the touch screen caused it to rewrite that file to good, or something, maybe? Probably not, but I can't think of any other explanation.

 

[Karel Jansens]

Thanks everyone. The weird battery number didn´t happen again, but I now have a new, and serious, issue. I made a new thread about it.