Power off / turning off flashing power light

[mikerr]

Those of us without a battery see a constantly flashing power LED.

Selecting "power off" in the firmware menu used to turn the LED off.
Well it still does - but now it also stops you going back into the menu ever again until a power disconnect !

Suggest a return to the old functionality, or a new menu item to just blank the LED ?

[Gadgetoid]

Ooofff... this sounds like a bug. "Power off" effectively puts the power chip into "Shipping Mode" and shouldn't affect anything at all if you're connected to external power. Though that said, "Power Off" should actually power the device off.

I think it's possible to clear the fault on the battery charge IC, or at least tell it to stop wildly flashing the LED. We changed this for the final units, wiring the LED to the STM32 instead.

[Daft-Freak]

Hmm, for me closing the menu causes the LED to come back on... which I guess is because that button is also the one used to turn the device back on...

[Gadgetoid]

Ooof, is this what you mean by not being able to get back into the menu @mikerr?

Will have to look into convincing the charge controller to... shhh.

[mikerr]

No, here's a full workflow:

1.(power LED flashing)
2. Enter firmware menu
3. Select "power off"
4. (power LED off)
5. Select "exit game"

You're now back in launcher with LED off. (yippee!)

You can launch games, but any press of the home button is ignored,
so you can't :

• open firmware menu.
• exit games with a long press

Home button still ignored after pressing reset, only pulling power returns back to normality - but with flashing LED again ( boo! )

This change happened somewhere around beta 0.14 as far as I can tell.

[Daft-Freak]

Yep, that definitely happens. Home button is entirely non-functional.

It's not a software bug though. With no battery and the charge IC off, there's no VBAT... which is what the home button uses...

Looks like this was "broken" by the button switch. (More of a weird edge-case).

(Interestingly, if I turn the backlight down by one step on my blit the LED stops flashing...)

[mikerr]

Ha, turning backlight to 90% stops the LED flashing quite so rapidly, then it just blinks every second or so...

[Daft-Freak]

Since v0.1.13 "Power Off" is always some kind of "off" even if plugged in (turns off the screen/audio and sleeps). I don't think there's a way to avoid the flashing light on a beta unit with no battery with no side-effects.

• No fault is detected (that causes a slow flash, I've seen it once)
• The HOME button is connected to VBAT
• There's no VBAT unless the charger is trying to charge the battery (HOME button only works when the light is on)

Though I guess this is "fixed" on release units by them always having a battery and the LED not being connected to the charge IC.