Pin login fails when unplugged

[slomobile]

Seems to work normally if plugged in.  When running on battery(any state of charge) the pin screen is only up very briefly unless you are constantly touching the screen.  On the rare case the phone does unlock, the screen very quickly goes black and locks again.

Seems to be an old bug when setting the screen timeout value wrote incorrect and very short time values to configuration file. So the updates do not help. You have to either manually correct the value or even better - flash the latest software image

I've been trying all day to get a new software image on it but it does not recognize any SD card.  lsblk only shows mmcblk2 and nothing changes with card in or out.  Tried jumpdrive, Manjaro, Mobian images. 
i edited .config/powermanagementprofilesrc and that delays the instant relock a few seconds, but the phone still does not obey Settings to never suspend and never dim.  It dims at 10sec, dimmer at 15sec
, suspends at 20 sec.

SD card stayed invisible until I ran 

Code:

sudo pacman -D
sudu pacman -Syu

Then rebooted and the Mobian image started unpacking, but keeps saying

mmc0: error -110 whilst initializing SD card
mmc0: card never left busy state

When I forced a reboot, it was still Manjaro and SD card was invisible to the OS again.
Still broken, but getting closer.  At least for a moment it knew there was an SD card present.  Could U boot be corrupt and still boot the emmc but not SD?

Looking at dmesg, I cant think of any reason other than hardware failure.  SD cards tried are Sandisk Extreme Pro 32gb and Transcend 16GB that both work in other systems.  I tried pushing them in extra hard just in case they werent all the way in.