11-27-2020, 10:58 PM
(11-27-2020, 02:25 PM)ImaPagan Wrote: Thank you for your post. No, the unit was not left on the USB charging cable. I know that there was no impact force to the unit for certain unless something happened to the unit in the factory or shipping, nor has it been over charged and never has been over-discharged. The charger is a standard 2 amp phone charger that is used with other devices without issues. If using the Pinetab for normal use, such as an e-reader causes it to run at high temperatures, than that would be an issue for Pine64 to figure out. My Pinetab has had very light use.
Also, I went ahead and submitted a ticket just to let Pine64 know of the issue. I was a bit surprised that they responded, since there have been complaints about lack of responses posted to the forum. They asked me to open up the Pinetab and take some photos, which I did. There is just a slight swelling noted on the edge of the battery nearest to the CPU. To my untrained eye it doesn't seem like much, but it may have been enough to crack the display. As in my original post, I offered to send the unit back to Pine64 for them to investigate further. I will post a follow up when there is news.
One difference is that I've mostly used the DC barrel jack and not the USB port.
Bare in mind that some cheap USB chargers can be wildly out of spec and it would depend on the device itself to handle that. I know the cheap LMS voltage regulators for example can behave real weird when overloaded, I overloaded a 500mA 5V chip with about 1.5A and it killed my device with 20V. I would test the phone charger under different loads if you're able to.
The swelling next to the CPU may indicate the CPU caused the problem. I guess one in ten thousand or so processors pass inspection but ultimately die after a little use, you may have been super unlucky.
When you were using the device as an e-reader, did you have it laying on your bed or something? When I'm using my PineTab it's always with the keyboard dock, so air is always getting to it. My friend once almost burned down our house by leaving his laptop on his bed... So I would take that quite seriously. In that case you *would* expect a thermal shutdown... But if it exists, who knows whether it's actually enabled or not.
