Neo Battery Failure?

17 years ago, mid-November | Leave a Comment

I’m a little worried about my Neo 1973, or more precisely it’s battery. We all know that the Neo doesn’t last particularly long with its battery, even after powering down, unless you take the battery out for a few minutes first. The problem started a few days about when my Neo seemed to reboot itself for no apparent reason. I noticed it about three times and thought nothing of it. Until now that is. I’m wondering how many times and for how long the battery can take being plugged into my laptop, getting charged and discharged on an almost daily basis. I’m trying to work it out, my Neo arrived on July 31 2007, If I estimate 1 charge / discharge per day that comes out at only 107 recharges, which is surely well under the life of a battery?

Looking at the graph below it appears that my battery is not charging while the Neo is powered up, or at least, it’s only getting enough charge to keep it at a fairly static level – ie not actually charging over what it takes to run the device.

I’ve Updated the graph because the Neo lost its charge competely, the graph should show this clearly and seems to mirror the results from here

I used a simple bash script to check for the voltage from

/sys/devices/platform/s3c2410-i2c/i2c-adapter/i2c-0/0-0008/battvolt

every second and then dump it to a file on my laptop. The Neo was plugged in via usb. To me the graph, measured over an hour, looks like it’s falling.

So it looks like either my battery and/or the charging circuit is damaged or I’m reading the data wrongly. I’m going to run the battery monitor for a day or so, or at least until the neo reboots itself. Once that is done I’ll put the second battery that I got with the advanced kit and see how that does in the same tests.