Pi-top 1 - Battery Not Charging due to over discharge flag

pi-top [1] + pi-topCEED
#1

Hi,

I have been having the same battery problem with my pi-top since day 1. I have replaced the hub twice and the battery 3 times but I guess this is a design flaw. But in any case, if I don’t use the pi-top for a couple of weeks it looses all its charge. Then some flag turns on in the battery and it will not charge at all anymore. So then I have to run pt-battery-fw-update to clear this flag so I can use the battery again. There is nothing wrong with any of the 3 batteries, once charged they work fine and power the pi-top for 8+ hours.

Recently my SD card failed and I installed Rasbian Bullseye, and I had some issues gettin the pi-top hardware to work until the following:

sudo apt install pi-top-os-apt-source -y
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends pi-topd pt-miniscreen pt-firmware-updater

I tried to install pt-battery-fw-update but it seems that it needs wiringpi which no longer exists.

Can some one please help me to get pt-battery-fw-update to work or alternatively let me know how to clear this flag so that I can continue to use my pi-top battery?

Many thanks in advance,

#2

Is there any advice / recommendations to solve this?

#3

Hi @MVDM
Sorry to hear about the issues you’re having with the pi-top [1] battery.
Unfortunately, there’s no software fix for this anymore. However, we do sell replacement batteries for the pi-top [1] if you would prefer that.

The cost of a battery is 50 USD, shipping is an additional 15USD and we can only ship to Europe due to international battery shipping rules. Is this something you would be interested in?
If so, then please reply to the email I sent you.

Thanks for being so patient with us.
Kind regards

2 Likes
#4

Hi RezN,

Thank you for your response. I am not convinced that there is anything wrong with the batteries as Pi-Top have sent me 2 replacement batteries and one or two hubs. I will need to check to confirm exactly how many hubs.

But I kept having this issue, where the battery would over discharge and then some flag is turned on inside the battery controller that needs to be reset.
If I purchase new battery will this permanently solve the issue, or will I continue to have this issue? If I continue to have this issue will I get a refund?

In the past, it seemed that the Pi-Top OS dealt with this, but I like to use Raspbian as with all my other projects. To overcome this on Raspbian, I had to run the battery firmware update to reset this flag and this was working fine.

However the battery firmware updater for the Pi-Top 1 doesn’t work anymore on Bullseye due to the fact the the WiringPi has been depreciated.

Can you maybe release a new pi-Top 1 firmware updater, or incorporate the pi-top1 firmware update function in the new software?

Alternatively can you please provide me with the schematics etc with details how to reset this flag then I will write my own script to take care of this.

Best Regards,