K5 Can a Kindle Touch battery die without triggering the "Critical Battery" error?

[WaseemAlkurdi]

Originally Posted by knc1

geekmaster is no longer with us.
But you can trust anything that he ever wrote here.

So, I guess I'm gonna throw it into fastboot mode for the last ever attempt at charging the damned thing.
Is rebuilding the battery (possibly using Li-ion cells instead of Li-po) an option? I know that the controller is incompatible, but aren't they all lithium?

[j.p.s]

Pretty much all handhelds use a single cell. There is no building up.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by WaseemAlkurdi

So, I guess I'm gonna throw it into fastboot mode for the last ever attempt at charging the damned thing.
Is rebuilding the battery (possibly using Li-ion cells instead of Li-po) an option? I know that the controller is incompatible, but aren't they all lithium?

geekmaster posted that fairly recently (about a year ago).
it is a matter of removing the electronics from the Kindle battery and putting them onto the new battery.
That makes the new battery respond with the Kindle ID and etc.

[WaseemAlkurdi]

Originally Posted by knc1

geekmaster posted that fairly recently (about a year ago).
it is a matter of removing the electronics from the Kindle battery and putting them onto the new battery.
That makes the new battery respond with the Kindle ID and etc.

You probably mean this, right?
It's a seriously interesting proposition, especially with battery cells like this one going for dirt cheap (with that store's new user discount, that would amount to $1 shipped - just insane).
However, does the procedure really boil down to breaking open the pack and soldering the two battery terminals to the metal tabs? Nothing more?
And is that linked battery's firmware compatible? (It's identical to the picture and description that geekmaster originally posted in that thread).

[knc1]

That is the thread I had in mind.


That model battery is too thick to fit in a Kindle (my drone uses that size battery).
But your point is correct, search around a bit and you can find what you need.

[WaseemAlkurdi]

Originally Posted by knc1

That is the thread I had in mind.


That model battery is too thick to fit in a Kindle (my drone uses that size battery).
But your point is correct, search around a bit and you can find what you need.

How thick is the Kindle's standard battery anyhow?
That battery was 62.8mm x 30.3mm x 7.3mm (2.47" x 1.19" x 0.29"), yet it won't fit.
Would a battery that is 5mm (0.196") long (like this one) fit?
The OEM battery is 1420 mAh ... I'm trying to find a 1400 mAh cell on that site that would be thinner than 5mm / 0.2", but I'm having a hell of a time. The least I can go is 5mm if I'm to stay at $5 or below.
Thinner batteries exist, but are as expensive as a regular aftermarket Kindle battery.

[WaseemAlkurdi]

@knc1

I've decided to buy the battery from a local electronics shop. It cost me $4.3, a little more expensive than buying online, but I'd rather not wait three weeks for the battery to arrive in ordinary mail. And that's if they did allow it to be shipped by air. And the peace of mind of not waiting. Anyhow.
It's gorgeous. A 1500 mAh battery, as wide and thick as the Kindle's original battery and only slightly longer. But it still fits in the Kindle's battery cavity (though not in the black wrapper).

Speaking of the black wrapper, I took the whole shebang (new battery, old battery, and Kindle) to a mobile phone repair shop (since the owner of electronics shop told me that he didn't know how to solder something that delicate). The guy in the mobile phone shop did a freaking amazing job (from the aftermath below, you can feel the sarcastic tone) of gnawing at the stickers and tearing at the foil around the battery, only to be faced by the battery's delicate controller chip, then asking for $7 to continue. Of course I refused after the s**tshow with the battery foil.

After looking at Geekmaster's guide again, I think I'm going to do it myself now. It's only two drops of solder ... but I'm going to make do with superglue until I find somebody to solder it properly. What do you think? Is it fine? Or is superglue conductive or something? I'm going to wait for your response and any words you have for me before I do anything rash.

You can see the batteries and the (destroyed) foil in the picture below. See how the lamination is all wrinkled, and the plastic and foil are all bent, and I fear that he did something to the battery controller chip. The new battery is the one with the cables protruding, and the old one is the one with the controller on the right.

(MobileRead's attachment upload system just crapped out on me, for some reason, so I had to use a third-party image upload site).

[knc1]

Super glue is non-conductive.
Can not be used as solder for the two connections.

Connections too delicate?
He must be kidding, or looking at the Kindle side of the connector, not the battery side of the connector board.
Probably a good thing you took back the parts before he wasted your new (and old) battery.

Looking at your new battery, you can see through the tape at the top where the chip and control board is at.
Although you can't see through the Kindle battery, it also has a similar control board.
You should be able to very carefully open the taped area of both batteries so you can see the overall situation.
Just don't open the "foil" area of the battery (which is part of the actual battery).

Do that little bit of surgery so that you, or your next repair person, can see what is required.

[WaseemAlkurdi]

So ... I've done it ... and it's not good news at all.

With a surgical blade (a real surgical blade ... it's a surgery after all! :-P ), I've torn apart at the yellow tape wrapped around the controller on the Kindle's battery, cut at the foil, and did a little trick with an old metal paper binder and the piece of yellow tape that I removed from the old battery. I put some glue on each cable tip, then used the binder to pin the two cables down to the terminal (over the foil from the old battery, since it's conductive). It's detailed in the images below.

Then I plugged the controller + battery in. Suspiciously, the orange light lit up immediately. In Geekmaster's case, it took a while to do so.
But voilà! The screen blanked and showed the "charging empty battery" icon! It's basically a matter of time now, right?
No.
The screen flashed again, and the Kindle tree showed. But no progress bar. It froze. Just like before the whole battery swap.

Unplugged and replugged the battery would throw the Kindle back to "charging empty battery" screen AND a "Lab126, Inc. Amazon Kindle 3/4/Paperwhite" device would show.
Each time, the time it spends at the "charging empty battery" screen would increase.

I forgot to tell you in my previous post that I asked the guy from the electronics shop to measure the voltage across the terminals of the dead battery before the other guy opened it up. It read 3.7 volts.
And so did the new battery, when I asked him to verify that it's charged before I paid for it.
Does it matter though? You once said this:

Note: Battery terminal voltage on a Li-Ion battery **does not** indicate storage (or remaining storage) capacity.

* Another point is that the Kindle makes all sorts of very faint multi-pitched hisses as it turns on.
* It can go to USB downloader mode, and imx_usb runs, but the Kindle won't leave USB downloader mode, nor would it accept any more imx_usb commands (would freeze at "Interface 0 claimed").
* And, with the new battery, it does turn on using its own power without being plugged in, but it still gets stuck at the tree.
* With the old battery, it used to boot once or twice in a looooong time. The last time it did turn on was two days ago. But not a single time since the battery replacement. Doesn't that rule out "sudden eMMC death"?

I'm literally freaking out by now. What should I do?

It just seems not to be the battery.
But if that's the case, why the hell did it freeze at 75%, and jump down to 37% on rebooting that first time it ever froze? Isn't that indicative of a dead battery? And why did freezing it caused the charge to drop from 100% to 0%? Isn't that even more of an indication?
But on the other hand, this.

What can you make out from all that mess?

Images:

[WaseemAlkurdi]

@knc1

I think I'm gonna need a serial cable to see where the boot process stops.
And since I'm getting a serial cable, I'm also buying a Kindle that needs a serial cable to jailbreak (considering a Paperwhite 2 or 3) as well as another Kindle Touch with a working battery to put in this one*. Hopefully, I'd have three working Kindles.

Could it be that the system has failed fsck, and freezes as a result of that?
This is because the Kindle "fake 0MB disk device" appears when the battery is "critically low" (the critical battery display) but not when the device is powered on (and perhaps attempting to mount the filesystem).
Another supporting point is that the Kindle freezes instead of turning off with the display on (like with the previous battery if I remember that one correctly).
BUT that doesn't explain why it successfully booted once in a while with the old battery.

* Why do I like the Kindle Touch even though it's outdated? It's touch, it's cheaper because of lower demand, it has internal speakers (even though they are crappy), a 3.5mm headphone jack, a hidden microphone, the magic button for USB downloader mode (more hackable as a result), and no light (= no eye fatigue - I don't buy the no-eye-fatigue-with-frontlight stuff, light is light no matter from where it comes). You can't get that package elsewhere, can you?

[WaseemAlkurdi]

Could freezing the Kindle again with new battery be of help? I'm thinking of this because the Kindle jumps to the "critical battery" screen every now and then - maybe it locks up because the battery is really low.

[knc1]

The picture you showed looked as if you had not removed the battery controller board from the new battery.
I.E: you had the Kindle controller board hooked to the new battery controller board (in its tape) hooked to the new battery.

If should be a one-for-one replacement of the board, not an add-on.

[WaseemAlkurdi]

****** UPDATE ******
The thing actually goes into fastboot, but only for two seconds!
And it also goes to diags (before the new battery, it never left USB download mode), but reboots after approximately two minutes. Waits for something, then timeout and reboot instead of continuing?

Below is a snippet of my host's dmesg. The first USB disconnect is when it leaves USB download mode, the connect is when it goes to fastboot, and note how it leaves fastboot two (seconds?) later.
I was able to run commands like the fastboot getvar * family, and the data returned is correct.

Anything you can make out of these two observations?
Is there anything I can execute in fastboot that might be of help?

[ 8641.573065] usb 2-3: USB disconnect, device number 16
[ 8641.880702] usb 2-3: new high-speed USB device number 17 using xhci_hcd
[ 8642.033791] usb 2-3: New USB device found, idVendor=1949, idProduct=d0d0, bcdDevice= 0.01
[ 8642.033795] usb 2-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 8642.033798] usb 2-3: Product: Kindle
[ 8642.033800] usb 2-3: Manufacturer: Amazon
[ 8642.033803] usb 2-3: SerialNumber: 006140111474097R
[ 8644.088701] usb 2-3: USB disconnect, device number 17

[WaseemAlkurdi]

The picture you showed looked as if you had not removed the battery controller board from the new battery.
I.E: you had the Kindle controller board hooked to the new battery controller board (in its tape) hooked to the new battery.

If should be a one-for-one replacement of the board, not an add-on.

That's intentionally done, just like Geekmaster did in his guide. Do you think it might be affecting the Kindle somehow?
With an "empty" controller board attached, the Kindle won't boot, so doesn't that mean that the Kindle did actually detect the battery, despite the second controller board?
Removing that controller board would void the shop's warranty on the new battery ... but if you think it might fix it, I'd be more than ready to remove it (because if the Kindle works, why would I return the new battery?)
Do you think I should go ahead and remove it? Do I do that before or after trying any fastboot commands?

[WaseemAlkurdi]

****** UPDATE 2 ******

I flashed the diags partition via USB. I first checked that fastboot actually works by issuing a fastboot download diagsys.bin. It flashed without an error, and did so in six seconds, so I tried again and unplugged the USB cable to make sure that it isn't just saying "Success" without really downloading anything. It did fail when I did that, and after that I flashed diags, then booted there. It worked. Previously, it didn't.

Upon exporting my USB storage, it was completely empty (save for an apparently recently generated file) ... I figured out that the filesystem might have sustained some real damage ... but on second thoughts, it might just be a result of having tried fastboot setvar bootmode factory and fastboot setvar bootmode reset.

Anyhow, I immediately SSH'ed into the Kindle ... I tried to transfer mmcblk0p1 from my backup, but I apparently screwed something up, reversing the direction of the nc pipe, I got garbled output onto my local terminal. Anyhow, I figured out that I should copy over the mmcblk0p* files to the exported USB storage instead of transferring via nc, as I was too anxious about getting it over with.

I tried disabling SSH from the menu (which did not work, obviously). I had to reboot again to diags. Since diags is fixed, that would be easy, right? I didn't want to be bitten twice by the same snake, so I selected the "Gas Gauge" option on the main diags screen to see how much battery I have. 36% and 500 mAh of capacity ... hmmm, not bad. Exit. Exit? Tap tap tap ... it had frozen again. Houston, we're in trouble.

Gave the button the good hard hold until the light goes off, then pressed Home, like I've done a million times now, then imx_usb'd the diags bundle ... to no avail. The thing is refusing to leave USB downloader mode. Just like with the dead battery.

A few minutes of self-loathing later, I tried again, it would boot to diags, but would freeze very soon after that. It even managed to successfully export the USB storage once, but didn't hold on to it for much longer as to copy mmcblk0p1.bin, much less flashing it.

And now, the battery (or something) is so dead that holding the power button for [13 | 40] seconds for a [reboot | full reboot] won't work at all, and USB download mode won't flash anything.

So, what do you think? Before flashing diags via fastboot, diags used to wait for something then reboot into main. After flashing, it booted diags. Therefore, diags was broken. Is that the case with main as well?
And is the battery going to charge up when broken like this?
And ... could it be an issue of broken solder on the CPU or other chip like in this link?