Issues when charging with portable battery

MNT Pocket Reform
1

I’m having some trouble charging my Pocket with a newly-purchased Anker 737 Power back. It has PD 3.1, and 140W max output, which should be more than enough.

It will charge when the unit is off, but when I turn it on, I get a “UVP Low voltage is detected and protection is activated” Then it won’t charge the pocket at all. I’ve tried both the out only, and the in/out ports, and get pretty much the same results.

(For reference, the battery was able to power my i5 ThinkPenguin laptop without the internal battery connected, so it seems to work, and have plenty of power)

Any ideas? Is this type of power brick unsuitable? Is there a way to tell what would work?

I’m not sure where in the logs I would look for an issue, but it happens so early, I would suspect that it is not going to show.

Any ideas how to troubleshoot?

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2

Which System Controller Firmware version are you on / did you ever try to update it? The latest version you can try is here:

To update, click “Download artifacts archive” button, open a terminal and cd to your Downloads folder, then:

unzip artifacts.zip
cd scripts
sudo ./update-sysctl-firmware.sh
3

I did update after I got the pocket.
The version that I’m on is PREF1SYSR120240730no

I’ll download and see if the version you suggested is newer.

4

Didn’t look like the same update, so I tried to run it. It looked like it was working:

Loading into flash went to 100%, then

“The device was asked to reboot back into application mode.
ERROR: The RP2040 device returned an error: rebooting”

Will a reboot of the device work, or is there something else to it?

5

Hmm, sounds unusual. You could try picotool reboot -f (probably with sudo). If it won’t budge, I’d say power down and toggle the standby switch off and on to reset it.

6

I shut it down, flipped the switch and left it for 5 minutes. Booted ok with the new revision …0830…

Booted fine. (fsck, but recovered fine) It was near 100%, but ran it for a few minutes, dropped a few %. Plugged in the battery, and it seems to work!

I’ll report back if there are glitches, but it looks promising.

Thanks for the quick response.

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