PinePhone replacement board won't stop vibrating

[acohl]

Okay, I really have to do something, because I've sunk in more money than I anticipated on this thing, and I can't even use it. Could I possibly just cut of the vibration motor from the sideboard and have it work? Could buying a new sideboard possibly help? What does this mean for energy consumption?

I haven't been able to use my Pinphone since 2020, and it's disappointing knowing that, probably, my only solution is to just buy another one when the next batch comes out.

The Pinephone will work OK without the vibration motor hooked up. I damaged mine (accidentally pried it open and damaged the wires) while replacing the screen I'd accidentally cracked early on, though later I installed a replacement USB side board and vibrator since they're cheap.

The problem though is cutting leads to the vibrator just fixes the symptom. I have no idea if the underlying problem will have other bad side effects, but since the phone is currently not usable you really have nothing to lose by trying. Disabling the vibrator should cut energy consumption.

Excellent. That's just the advice I was looking for. I cut the vibrator off from the pads, and the phone was able to boot up. I'll mark the thread as solved, even though, as you pointed out, since the phone isn't cured but merely asymptomatic.

I do want to ask, though, when you did this tweak on your own PinePhone, did you encounter the same error code/lights as I did? Before this, I believe the PinePhone started up as usually. I would hit the power button, the led on the right would shine a solid red for one second, and then the phone would boot up as usual. Now that I've removed the vibrator, the phone shines red for a second, then yellow, and then white, and it does this twice before it boots up.

I don't see any info on the lights in the wiki, so I don't know how to interpret this. I mean, causality would tell me that it probably means something consistent with, "somebody cut off the vibration motor", but it help to know if this is applicable to you, so as to ensure this behavior has some relationship with my actions and isn't something separate.

It would also be appreciated if someone could chime in and tell me whether the pre-modded startup (with the single red light) is consistent with how the PinePhone is supposed to behave by default.

Anyways, thanks for the help, everyone. I will probably buy the sideboard in the future and replace the current one so that I can figure out if that may contribute to the issue, but, I suppose that will be further off than what I once dreaded it might be.