Charging Problems With Playbook
The problem with charging stems from the way the internal charger has been designed. The way RIM designed their charger is it needs a small amount of battery power to run its micro-controller for the charger management. They did not design a fail-safe bypass charging circuit that is not dependent on the state of the battery, where it can put a basic required amount of start current directly to the battery to get the process going. Normally all chargeable type systems are designed with a battery fail-safe system in case the battery goes flat.
When doing the so-called stack process, you are causing a trigger affect through the circuits to give a sort of pulse to the battery before the management circuits kick in. Doing this process over and over again is eventually allowing enough charge to the battery to get the charger management working properly.
I have no idea why anyone would design a charger type circuit where if the battery goes too flat, it is almost impossible to charge it. This is a bad design as far as I am concerned.
When my first Playbook was new out of the box for some reason it was too dead to make it work. I had to mess around with the stack charge idea for a number of hours just to start. I almost returned it. I have it a year now, and as far as what it does for me I am very satisfied with it. I own a number of these tablets now. They are of very good quality except for the few bugs here and there, and also the charging issue.
If I had an engineer working for me who design a battery charge system that worked like in the Playbook, he'd be out on his bottom-side very quickly. This makes no sense at all. :mad:
--
Insane Example:
This is something like designing a great car, but if it runs completely out of gas the fuel cap will not come off to allow the user to re-fuel it. This is because the engine has to be running to remove the fuel cap. So, the user has to somehow try to put the fuel directly in to the gas lines in order to get the engine running enough to allow the fuel cap to be removed. :D
Comment:
I like the Blackberry phone and Playbook a lot. I am due for a phone upgrade. I find the delay of the BB10 sort of annoying. I wanted to upgrade four BB phones this year, and buy another two PB tablets. I have no idea about what I am going to do if any of the phones were to go defective. I also don't want to invest a large amount of money in to the phones with older technology, and also have the risk if BB is not around much longer to support these products!
Jerry G.
_________
Did you try the Stack charging? Here's a variety of ways folks have done it:
Locked, bricked
I was told about "stack" charging, 6 cycles of charge no charge, for 2 minutes each, charging for never more than 2 minutes.
Plug the PB in with the factory charging cable (red light comes on for a several seconds, then goes off). Wait about 10 more seconds. Unplug PB for about 30 seconds.
Repeat n times.
n == 6 for me. Finally my PB light switched to green, then began to oscillate, signalling charging. After a few more minutes my PB came back to life.
You might want to UNplug/Replug at the wall/socket end to avoid using or damaging the weaker usb port on the pb itself.
Just talked to tech support, because i'm impatient sometimes. Here is the initial process they gave me to try.
Plug in the charger for 2 mins, unplug for 10 sec -> Repeat 6 to 8 times
Then while unplugged perform the Hard reset (POWER, VOL + and - at the same time) . **When the red light comes on PLUG IN THE CHARGER**
The playbook is supposed to then start charging/boot.
--------------
Try leaving it plugged in for an hour or more.
let us know....