PineBook Pro revision 2.2: Wishlist for the hardware issue fixes

[chip ling]

I wish the power circuit can be improved so the PBP will not draw power from the battery while the PBP is connected to the A/C adapter.

Mine PBP keeps drawing power from the battery when I have the A/C connected. And eventually use up all the power from the battery.

It takes more than half a day to charge the battery too.

[KC9UDX]

The latest production run (2022) doesn't seem to have this problem. Mine will charge when I'm using it full-bore.

I wonder if your battery or power supply are different. None of mine take that long to charge.

[chip ling]

The latest production run (2022) doesn't seem to have this problem.  Mine will charge when I'm using it full-bore.

I wonder if your battery or power supply are different.  None of mine take that long to charge.

Good point. I'm not sure whether my battery or power supply have issue or not. I brought the whole set and I expected it should work out from the box.

I used the PBP for two weeks only after I received it. Originally want it runs 24/7 as my ssh vpn routing machine but gave up after it run out of power every 2 days and I have to charge it for another day. Also tried to use it as a developer machine. Mainly terminal editing using vi and cc for compilation.

I eventually gave up and brought the Raspberry Pi 400 and is now running headless 24/7.

I still looking for a laptop form factor linux machine and I do like the PBP especially the keyboard.

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The latest production run (2022) doesn't seem to have this problem.  Mine will charge when I'm using it full-bore.

I wonder if your battery or power supply are different.  None of mine take that long to charge.

Good point. I'm not sure whether my battery or power supply have issue or not. I brought the whole set and I expected it should work out from the box.

I used the PBP for two weeks only after I received it. Originally want it runs 24/7 as my ssh vpn routing machine but gave up after it run out of power every 2 days and I have to charge it for another day. Also tried to use it as a developer machine. Mainly terminal editing using vi and cc for compilation.

I eventually gave up and brought the Raspberry Pi 400 and is now running headless 24/7.

I still looking for a laptop form factor linux machine and I do like the PBP especially the keyboard.

BTW, would you mind to run some tests on your PBP non-stop for a couple days. I'm curious whether your PBP is better than mine.

If you want to help, I'll give you the instruction later on.

[KC9UDX]

I never turn mine off. None of them. My wife uses one with Manjaru. I run NetBSD, and on the older one I use estd to throttle the CPU usage. These days I run VICE on it almost exclusively. I usually get 6 or 7 hours of use on battery and then charge it for a couple of hours. The other one, which I received a couple of months ago also runs NetBSD. I was able to compile several large pkgsrc packages with the CPUs running full bore for several days and the battery never went below 100%, which surprised me. I use it pretty regularly for web browsing, and remotely controlling several other machines with VNC. I don't even think about the battery in it. Whatever changed with the new hardware design is amazing in this regard.

I won't be home to do much testing for probably over a month. When I do get time at home, time will be precious. Else I'll be happy to help.

[chip ling]

I never turn mine off.  None of them.  My wife uses one with Manjaru.  I run NetBSD, and on the older one I use estd to throttle the CPU usage.  These days I run VICE on it almost exclusively.  I usually get 6 or 7 hours of use on battery and then charge it for a couple of hours.  The other one, which I received a couple of months ago also runs NetBSD.  I was able to compile several large pkgsrc packages with the CPUs running full bore for several days and the battery never went below 100%, which surprised me.  I use it pretty regularly for web browsing, and remotely controlling several other machines with VNC.  I don't even think about the battery in it.  Whatever changed with the new hardware design is amazing in this regard.

I won't be home to do much testing for probably over a month.  When I do get time at home, time will be precious.  Else I'll be happy to help.

From your experience, sounds like my PBP is not right then.

I got my PBP on early 2020, still have the stock debian version running on it and with the stock power supply came with it.

I took it out last night, charged it up to 100%. Wrote a small asm program to perform endless looping. Then run the program five times in the background. (i.e. the PBP has 6 cores, I'm pushing it to 5 cores 100% load, overall 83% load on cpu)

After 3 hrs run with the A/C connected, the battery level drops to 89%.

Just wonder if PBP after 2020 went through any circuit changes.

[KC9UDX]

From your experience, sounds like my PBP is not right then.

On the contrary,

I got my PBP on early 2020, still have the stock debian version running on it and with the stock power supply came with it.

I took it out last night, charged it up to 100%. Wrote a small asm program to perform endless looping. Then run the program five times in the background. (i.e. the PBP has 6 cores, I'm pushing it to 5 cores 100% load, overall 83% load on cpu)

After 3 hrs run with the A/C connected, the battery level drops to 89%.

yours sounds like it is the same or better than mine which I got the same time you did, and the one I got a year later.

Just wonder if PBP after 2020 went through any circuit changes.

Yes, but specifically, it was in 2022.  I have lost track of time: I'm not positive how long I've had this one; but I think it was the latest production run when this change happened.  The main board must have been completely redesigned.  The only differences I am certain of though, are much, much better battery life and charging (most likely due to better cooling charactaristics), and different switches and switch placement.  The switch to disable the eMMC in my latest one is not the same as the Wiki picture, which does match the ones I got in 2020 and 2021.

BTW, kudos on sticking with that Debian install.  If I weren't using NetBSD, I'd still be using it; I much prefer it over Manjaru.