Pinecil not working
#1
I received my Pinecil yesterday, which would have been great timing as I have a small soldering project to do this weekend. But sadly it is now not working and i'm not sure what to do...

When I first plugged it in, I used this Aukey USB-C power supply, which I often use to keep my PBP charged up. Initially I didn't heat it up yet, but as advised in today's Pine64 News, I decided to update the firmware first. i'm running Gentoo on my PBP and was able to install dfu-utils and the flashing process seemed to go fine.

Next I was ready to fire the thing up, so I disconnected it from the PBP and plugged it into the Aukey power supply again, then pushed the button to heat it up. It heated up very quickly, and there was a tiny bit of smoke coming off of the tip - this didn't concern me, since it was its first time getting that hot. Once it got up to temp (like 350 degrees C or something), I turned it off and waited for it to cool back down. It's really nice having the display so I can easily tell when it's safe to put it away.

After it had been sitting for a few minutes and was back down to a normalish temperature, the display suddenly turned off. I assumed it went to sleep because I hadn't done anything with it for a while, and i expected once I pushed the buttons it would wake back up, but it did not respond. So I unplugged it for a few seconds and then plugged it back in (to the power brick) and still nothing happened.

So next I thought maybe something went wrong with the firmware, I'll try reflashing it. But when I plug it into my PBP, it's no longer detected as a USB device. Here's what I'm seeing now:
  • If I leave it unplugged for a while (like 10 minutes or so) and then plug it into the PBP, in dmesg I see something like:
    [  +1.360001] usb 2-1-port1: Cannot enable. Maybe the USB cable is bad?[  +0.000384] usb 2-1-port1: attempt power cycle(but not the usual message with the USB vendor/device id's like it showed earlier)
  • If I hold down "-" while plugging it in, nothing shows up at all.
I wonder if that means it is "soft bricked"? I assume I would need the breakout board to recover from that, but is there any way for me to confirm that it's not a hardware problem first? Or what would be the next logical troubleshooting step?
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Messages In This Thread
Pinecil not working - by psychedup - 01-15-2021, 07:51 PM
RE: Pinecil not working - by Ralim - 01-16-2021, 06:04 AM
RE: Pinecil not working - by psychedup - 01-16-2021, 11:35 AM
RE: Pinecil not working - by Ralim - 01-16-2021, 06:48 PM
RE: Pinecil not working - by psychedup - 01-16-2021, 08:33 PM

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