Power dock turning off after 30 minutes

[Lazar Demin]

@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?

[Niels Christensen]

@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

[Lazar Demin]

@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.

[Burton Strauss]

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 ...

[Niels Christensen]

@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.

[Niels Christensen]

@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).

[Lucien Jamieson]

@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.

[Lazar Demin]

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.

[Lazar Demin]

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!

[Niels Christensen]

@Lazar-Demin How did you get on? As you can imagine this isn't confidence inspiring behaviour from the little critters.

In a strange turn of events leaving the device turned on without it's usual relay board attached has seen uptime of a few days now. Is this the culprit or is it just luck?

[Lazar Demin]

@Niels-Christensen See my post above! https://community.onion.io/topic/1815/power-dock-turning-off-after-30-minutes/20

[Niels Christensen]

@Lazar-Demin Oh haha, I guess I hadn't refreshed my page. Thanks I'll give that a go

[Niels Christensen]

Have been looking at this on and off for the last month. I'm still finding that my x2 Omega2+'s are turning off after a random timeframe when connected to a power dock.

Similarly when connected to a expansion dock, the onion stays on indefinitely.

@Lazar-Demin Did you look into this further?