External battery charger

Hello all,

Hope somebody can help:

I perpetrated the "cardinal sin" to let my FR battery run completely 
empty, so now I cannot boot up to charge the battery. I have purchased a 
generic external charger (meant for Nokia batteries, same form-factor as 
the FIC battery), but it does not charge the FIC battery (I have read on 
the WIKI that most external chargers are useless, but I decided to take 
a calculated risk...). I received a generic 600mA battery (half the 
FIC's capacity) with the charger, and that seems to work OK with my FR 
(apart from the battery level checking that does not work). At least I 
can boot my FR with the generic battery in order to do some 
development/playing...

It seems that it is quite important to have more than one battery handy 
if you want to use the FR for anything serious at the moment, due to the 
really bad battery life(a lot better now with 2008.12 which lasts almost 
20 hours, with FDOM I could barely get 6 hours...). I'm seriously 
considering buying two extra FIC batteries, but then it becomes an 
important item to have an external charger that works. If anybody here 
knows of a working model that is available within Europe/UK, I would 
appreciate it immensely if you could let me know the make/model and 
where to purchase. The battery life situation is actually the very last 
item in my mind that will keep the FR out of mainstream use, the 
available software stacks all have the basic capability to address all 
usability issues (GPRS/GSM et al). TangoGPS is fantastic! 

In the meantime, is there any (non-destructive) way to coax the FR into 
life with the flat battery, so that I can charge it?

Re: External battery charger

My freerunner has been in my bag all week. i found if you hold the aux
button in. then plug in the external charger. it boots to nor flash.

azmodie

p.s. Happy GNU Year

Re: External battery charger

Hello azmodie,

azmodie wrote:
> My freerunner has been in my bag all week. i found if you hold the aux
> button in. then plug in the external charger. it boots to nor flash.
>   

Genius! Thanks a stack! 

> p.s. Happy GNU Year
>   

Same to you!

--

-- 
Regards,
Jan Henkins

Re: External battery charger

azmodie wrote:
> My freerunner has been in my bag all week. i found if you hold the aux
> button in. then plug in the external charger. it boots to nor flash.
> 
> azmodie
> 
> p.s. Happy GNU Year
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Openmoko community mailing list
> community <at> lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community

I also see cell phone dump boxes at a few different department stores as
recycling depots.. Maybe you could snatch a compatible batteries from
one of the nokias in the box?

Re: External battery charger

Quoting Jan Henkins <jan <at> henkins.za.net>:

> Hello all,
>
> Hope somebody can help:
>
> I perpetrated the "cardinal sin" to let my FR battery run completely
> empty,
<snip>
> In the meantime, is there any (non-destructive) way to coax the FR into
> life with the flat battery, so that I can charge it?

What I've done is boot the Freerunner with the spare battery, plug in the wall
charger that came with the Freerunner (or force 500 mA charge on a suitable USB
charger supply) then remove the spare battery and put in the FIC battery.  The
Freerunner will run without battery when the wall charger is plugged in and
will charge the FIC battery once it is inserted.

IanS

Re: External battery charger

Or with a recent uboot - plug into usb and wait for 10-15 minutes.
Remove usb and battery for 30 seconds, plug back in and it should
bootup.  You may need to remove/replug the usb to make sure its charging
properly once up.

USB defaults to 100ma, not enough to boot the FR, but it will
tricklecharge it when off until enough of a charge exists to boot - once
past the intial boot stage, the CPU negotiates the full 500ma and all is
fine.

BillK

On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 21:16 -0500, Ian Stephen wrote:
> Quoting Jan Henkins <jan <at> henkins.za.net>:
> 
> > Hello all,
> >
> > Hope somebody can help:
> >
> > I perpetrated the "cardinal sin" to let my FR battery run completely
> > empty,
> <snip>
> > In the meantime, is there any (non-destructive) way to coax the FR into
> > life with the flat battery, so that I can charge it?
> 
> What I've done is boot the Freerunner with the spare battery, plug in the wall
> charger that came with the Freerunner (or force 500 mA charge on a suitable USB
> charger supply) then remove the spare battery and put in the FIC battery.  The
> Freerunner will run without battery when the wall charger is plugged in and
> will charge the FIC battery once it is inserted.

Re: [Android] on SD card

Radek thank you very much for this post. I was able to try the
Android; very interesting.
Having the SD card version was a great help. I like the real clock
faces especially.
I will try your further suggestions if I get some spare time, by then
it may all be different..
Good wishes for New Year,
clare

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 12:05 PM, Radek Polak <psonek2 <at> seznam.cz> wrote:
> Hi,
> i have android booting from SD card. It wasn't that hard to make it work.
>
> You will need SD with one ext3 partition. Download and unpack tarball from
> here [1] and boot with Qi [2]. First boot take quite a lot of time. Then it
> will be faster.
>
> You can also compile from sources [3] and put the rootfs together yourself.
> You just have to put together what is in out/target/product/freerunner
> directory and add kernel (either the Sean's [4] or andy tracking[5]). I have
> attached my script which does this [6]. Last this is to modify init.rc file
> so that it mounts SD card, you can find it attached or here [7].
>
> While Android boots or later you can attach to it with adb like this:
>
> ifconfig usb0 192.168.0.200
> adb kill-server
> adb shell
> adb logcat
>

Re: How do you like to read a phone number?

On Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:36:34 am George Brooke wrote:

> Knowing the UK, any coherency is probably just pot-luck 

Or the result of the complete stuff up of PhoneDay in 1995 (predicted in 
1993[1]) which resulted in another numbering change being needed 16 months 
later[2] which was moderately sensible.   Sigh..

cheers,
Chris (maintainer of the uk.telecom FAQ around then)

[1] - http://tinyurl.com/7uyqc4  (goes to a uk.telecom posting on Google 
groups from 1993)

[2] - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_/ai_n14061243

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 Chris Samuel  :  http://www.csamuel.org/  :  Melbourne, VIC

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Re: IO errors when booting from SDHC 4gb Sandisk card

"Michal Brzozowski" <rusolis <at> poczta.fm> writes:

>>> interesting. i thought it was fixed in recent u-boots.
>
>
>> If so, it is fixed in 2.6.28 kernel. I have similar trouble with
>> Kingston 4GB SDHC, and with 2.6.24 i can't get access to SD card (only
>> sometimes, very rarely) even with messing with sd_max_clk parameter.
>> With 2.6.28, without specifying sd_max_clk it gets access, but only
>> for some (2-3) minutes. With lower sd_max_clk and 2.6.28 it works. But
>> it's still annoying - I have resume problems (and not only) with
>> 2.6.28, so i'm using 2.6.24. I will later put some info from dmesg and
>> after messing with voltage on kernel maillist.
>
> Which 2.6.28 image are you using?  I downloaded one from people/andy,
> but it still doesn't boot for me.
>

Maybe you guys would like to improve :
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Supported_microSD_cards too ?

Just my 2 cents,

--

-- 
Olivier BERGER 
(OpenPGP: 1024D/B4C5F37F)
http://www.olivierberger.com/weblog/

Re: External battery charger

Jan Henkins <jan <at> henkins.za.net> writes:

> Hello all,
>
> Hope somebody can help:
>
> I perpetrated the "cardinal sin" to let my FR battery run completely 
> empty, so now I cannot boot up to charge the battery.

FAQ ? :

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner_Battery

Please people, try and improve the wiki, and use it as a reference
when responding to such queries, and make the wiki content even better
in 2009 ! ;)

Regards,
--

-- 
Olivier BERGER 
(OpenPGP: 1024D/B4C5F37F)
http://www.olivierberger.com/weblog/