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Power dock turning off after 30 minutes

  • J

    Hi,
    After I set up my Omega2+ (powered with the power dock and 2A USB charger), it ran for around 30 minutes and then
    it switched off. All the leds on the dock are off. If I use the ON/OFF switch, it turns on again for 30 minutes and then stops again.
    I haven't tried to power the Omega with another source than the dock yet...
    I tried with several different chargers though.

    Has anyone experimented that situation?

    1 L 1 Reply
  • L

    I'm having the same issue. I have been powering it off of a 5v 2.5amp wall charger and it has issues staying on for longer than 30 minutes. I have tried using a plain usb to computer to power it with no better results. A weird thing that happens to mine is the switch does nothing after the 30 minutes. Switching it on and off does nothing; I have to un-plug then re-plug it in.

    1
  • T NT

    I gave up on my power dock in the end, there is something not right with it I am sure. In fact I had cause to plug it on just to supply 5V to an audio amp I was testing (lots of ambient noise when plugging into the Omega) and it was fine until I turned the volume up to more than 50% then it would play a sound file but in the middle reset the power and restart. This is with a 2.5A USB supply. This confirmed my suspicion that the Power dock had a problem supplying power correctly. Which explains why it would not power up the Omega by just plugging usb power into it. It would charge the battery but you had to toggle the power switch to get it to supply power to the Omega.

    All in all I think the Power Dock has some design/build issues and I opted for another solution which I have to say is much nicer in the end.

    1
  • C

    I have the same issue.

    0
  • Janek Kowal

    Does it work correctly now?

    0
  • ?

    Same issue here šŸ˜ž

    0
  • N

    I'm having similar issues with both of my Power docks too. But I'm finding it's after about a day of being powered up the Onion goes offline but the Power dock is still on.

    My Expansion dock works fine though and has been up for over a week. Is it just a poor design? šŸ˜•

    Any guesses on what would be a good fix? Is there a component that could be swapped to fix this issue?

    0
  • N

    I've messaged Onion on twitter with this thread address so let's see if they respond.

    0
  • N

    Interestingly, I've found if the power dock has a battery plugged into it it stays powered up. So far for three days which is a record.

    I wonder if without something to charge the power dock is producing fluctuating voltages which is causing the onion to power off?

    Does anyone know how this could be tested exactly?

    0 Lazar Demin 1 Reply
  • L

    @Julien-D Same issue here, wrote a program that times it for me at 50 minutes every time. Powering from a PC usb or a 5V 550mA power supply. However I was just reading modes of the power dock and when my unit is plugged into a PC USB port with no battery attached, the low battery warning LED is flashing instead of stationary mode where the LEDs should be flashing erratically.

    0 N 1 Reply
  • N

    @Lucien-Jamieson It's interesting that it's 50 minutes each time for you... I'd imagine your PC USB port can't provide enough amps, hence the warning?
    I'd also guess that the Expansion dock pulls less amps so just swapping for one of those wouldn't be a fair test, but if it did show the same warning it'd be tell tale that PC USB isn't outputting enough.
    I'm using 1amp minimum chargers for my Onions.

    0
  • Lazar Demin
    administrators

    @Niels-Christensen @Julien-D @Lucien-Jamieson
    Can you give a bit more details about the situation? Am I correct in assuming that you're using the Power Dock with no battery (stationary mode) when it exhibits this behaviour? (See the Power Dock modes in our documentation)

    When it does turn off, is it just the Omega that turns off or is it the Dock as well?
    Is the Power Dock's power LED still on?

    0 L 1 Reply
  • N

    @Lazar-Demin said in Power dock turning off after 30 minutes:

    Power Dock modes

    Hi Lazar,
    Thanks for getting involved, I'm not sure I can speak for everyone, but for me it appears to only be a problem when in stationary mode. The power dock stays on and the Onion dies after a while (orange led off and not responding to pings).

    Niels

    0 Lazar Demin 1 Reply
  • Lazar Demin
    administrators

    @Niels-Christensen Ok, thanks for the info, that's really helpful. We'll be investigating this and will have an official response by the end of the month.

    0 N 1 Reply
  • B

    I had a similar problem with the mini dock, using a 500ma left over wall wart. I've tried two Omega2+s. I next switched to a 2A unit (left over Kindle charger) and it's been running 4 days (so far, fingers crossed).

    From the specs, 500mA should have been enough, but ...

    0 N 1 Reply
  • N

    @Burton-Strauss I've got a few 1A and 2A chargers, and they're both showing the same problem with the x2 power docks I have.

    0
  • N

    @Lazar-Demin Thanks Lazar, I've since noticed after a round of casual testing last night that when using a 1A USB charger, one of the power dock turns off too (all LEDs off).
    It may be the dock or the charger in this particular test so I'll do some more testing this week with a different known good 2A charger I use for my Pi server (always on).

    0
  • L

    @Lazar-Demin For myself, I am running a power dock in stationary mode with no battery connected, however the LED is flashing low battery warning (not erratically). I have tried a 2A wall wart with the same results. The power dock and Omega, all LED's turn off.

    0
  • Lazar Demin
    administrators

    Hmmm, I've had a Power Dock plugged in for about 2 hours in stationary mode (no battery, short USB cable) with the lights flashing erratically with no reboots.

    Fri Aug 18 20:54:00 EDT 2017    20:54:00 up  1:48,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

    I'll try leaving it over the weekend and seeing what happens. Will report back monday/tuesday.

    0 N 1 Reply
  • Lazar Demin
    administrators

    An update from my end:

    • I've left two Power Docks in stationary mode (connected to power via micro USB port and no battery) since Friday
    • One has the LEDs flashing erratically, the other has the LEDs looking like it's charging a battery (for whatever reason)

    I made a cron job to track the uptime in a file, this is my latest reading:

    root@Omega-7CCB:~# uptime
 14:22:26 up 3 days, 13:54,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

    They both rebooted in the middle of the night on Saturday at the exact same time. Which leads me to believe that the office or my USB hub might have momentarily lost power.

    In any case, I haven't been able to reproduce your issue.

    I do, however, have a suggestion!

    Try configuring the cron daemon to run the power-dock command once every 10 or 20 minutes.

    Install the power-dock package:

    opkg update
opkg install power-dock

    Open the crontab editor

    crontab -e

    Enter:

    #
*/20 * * * * /usr/bin/power-dock 
#

    Save and exit, then restart the cron daemon:

    /etc/init.d/cron restart

    My suspicion here is that the Battery Management chip is not detecting enough current draw from the Omega and deciding that it should just shut down to conserve power. By running the power-dock command every once in a while, you give the chip an indication that it needs to stay powered on!

    Try it out and please let me know how it goes!

    0
powerdock 9
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