Pocket Reform doesn't start, doesn't light up, doesn't charge - SOLVED

[aaa]

(Edit: Probably solved: Pocket Reform doesn't start, doesn't light up, doesn't charge - SOLVED - #4 by aaa )

A while back I was going to turn on my Pocket after a long while laying off and drained. Usually it’s a bit finicky to get up and going after such a long time. First put charger in slow charging port then in fast charging port, maybe turn the mother board switch on and off again with the cord plugged in, and do a quick prayer to the machine god while at it.

But this time it didn’t turn on. Not a light. I disassembled it and found the motherboard switch broken. I got a new one and replaced the broken one. Checked that it worked with a multi-meter. Still nothing. I started prodding around inside of it with the multi-meter. No power from the batteries. But other than one cell being fully drained. They seemed fine. Switched to the original batteries, which are known good. Still nothing. Still no power going anywhere past the power board. Switched to the old power board. Still the same. Other than ~0.15v on the i2p pins.

One weird thing is that i hear a quiet clicking from the processor area when the charger is hooked up to the slow charging port. Tiny tiny relay?

I’m currently trying to understand how power comes from the batteries to the system controller to generate the signal to turn on the system.

Any tips or ideas on finding what’s wrong would be appreciated.

Tl;Dr: Pocket doesn’t start. I’ve tested some things. No power is leaving the power board to the system controller as far as I can see. How is the the system controller supposed to get power? Any tips or ideas on finding what’s wrong?

[kianryan]

You said the batteries are good, I’m assuming charged.

Have you tried the charging board bypass to see if it’s a problem at the mainboard end or the charging board end?

Running the Pocket without batteries (bypassing a broken charging board)

Hi, when my charging board broke, minute provided immediate assistance to me on IRC to get my pocket back in action: 2025-05-22.log Since there is no structured guide for this from MNT (yet) and since I just took these photos anyways, I wanted to share these steps with you in case they are useful for somebody. This expands on what @staticbunny already wrote in their post (also with photos) but uses one of the jumpers from the Pocket Reform motherboard as suggested by minute instead of a custom…

[aaa]

Thanks! That actually worked… if some weird display behaviour. I’ll have too see if this was just user error from me being extremely tired and then thinking I’d tested things or actually something with the charging board.

[aaa]

Okay so it seems like one of connectors from the larger batteries is bad. It was a bit of a hackjob as I couldn’t find the right gauge of wire. So not surprised. It’s only slightly loose to so intermittently it looks like it’s dead.

Might be bad connector, broken switch that and tired brain that was the combination of errors.