Dead MNT Reform, won't charge

MNT Reform
1

Well, not even 12 hours after receiving my Reform, it’s already dead :frowning:

Yesterday evening, I let it run on batteries from fully charged to figure out how long the laptop would run, and also calibrate the charge circuitry to get a percentage remaining value, but I fell asleep on the couch.

This morning, I woke up to a dead laptop of course, but now it fails to charge: the red LED inside the case doesn’t turn on when I plug in the USB-C charger and the OLED screen won’t turn on.

Any advice?

2

I opened up the laptop, disconnected and reconnected the two battery packs, and now the LED turns on but the OLED screen just says “Reform” and is totally unresponsive.

I’m hoping it’s charging and it’ll come back to life at some point.

3

This is currently being figured out on IRC. @gsora has the same problem and @minute is working on a fixed firmware for the keyboard and a fixed LPC driver.

4

Well, it charged for a few minutes so I disconnected and reconnected the battery packs again and now it’s back to life. The cell all show 3.1V so at least they haven’t been drained to kingdom come. At least that’s something.

5

The battery boards have a protection circuit in them, so even if something go super wrong, it should not be able to damage your cells.

As far as I understand the issue, it is connected to having the OLED screen on the keyboard open. Did you have the OLED display on when your unit borked out?

I received a RK3588 classic Reform from the same batch as you and am currently flashing the new firmware to confirm that it indeed fixes this.

6

I don’t remember if the OLED display was on. I was planning on working on the machine, watching the battery levels as they went down and shutting down the machine when it got too low, but I was exhausted from the day’s work yesterday and I sort of fell into a slumber before it happened :slightly_smiling_face: So I assume the OLED display was on and showing the cells’ voltage. But I’m not sure.

7

Speaking of which, is this a compile-and-flash job, or some binary I can pull somewhere?

I’ve never done it so I gotta get into that particular groove I guess.

8

This is handled by the handbook here:

Please point out the parts which are lacking in documentation, so that I can create a patch to fix them.