[SOLVED] Red light flashes next to barrel-port

[moonwalkers]

was it charging while off? did you use barrel or usb? turn off and use the other.

It was charging while off using the barrel charger provided with the pinebook.

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That flashing red light means the power used by the machine is higher than what it can draw from the power supply. Unfortunately, this appears to be a common occurrence for this machine when it is under a heavy use. It seems the biggest drain is WiFi, but I'm yet to do proper power use measurements.

Thanks for clarifying what the red light means. However, forgot to mention that the pinebook was charged while being powered off which means that the flashing red light in my case indicates something else?

I had mine refuse to charge when completely turned off on occasion. Happens more often when I have 1A power supply connected or a weaker USB-C charger, rarely happens when the original PSU is connected, usually only on those occasions when I accidentally manage to run the battery almost completely flat.

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Are you sure the led blink when drawing more power than it can charge ? It happened to me when there was no load. I've read on the archlinux installation faq it was when the soc was too hot, a thermal security.
When my soc get too hot, i underclock the cpu @1,2Ghz on BIG and 1Ghz on small, for everyday usages it's enough for me (Manjaro overclock the cpu to 2Ghz BIG/1,6Ghz little instead of 1,8Ghz BIG/1,5Ghz little which is a mistake i think, too much power draw and heat).

/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq

replace cpuX by  : cpu 0-3 little | cpu 4-5 BIG

Never happened to me anymore for the moment.

Pretty sure it's not about SoC being hot, because I had it blink even when machine is not that hot, and vice versa had the machine so hot it was burning my lap yet the light wasn't blinking. It seems when the load is just on CPU/GPU it's fine, it's when CPU load is combined with heavy WiFi and I/O use that it starts blinking and the battery charge starts slowly decreasing. Once the load is reduced sufficiently the light stops blinking and the battery charge starts increasing again. Now it might still be thermal protection because the battery itself gets too hot, though TBH I kinda doubt it. Would be nice to hear some "word of god" here from the hardware engineers.

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iirc the blinking red charge light is a battery fault, but i hope this is documented somewhere.

i rarely/never have power issues with 2.0/1.4, but i have found that i prefer conservative governor on battery and performance while plugged in (compiling) to optimize heat and power usage.

This may make sense if it is a temporary fault that clears up when the draw drops, I'd love to see some documentation on the topic too. Otherwise, just now I was downloading several big files, the average CPU utilization was about 75%, download speed about 11+ MBps, the red light was blinking and the battery slowly went down from 83% to 80%. Then download stopped, CPU utilization dropped, and soon after red light stopped blinking and now my battery already back up to 81%.

Do you mean the U-boot and firmware blobs version by 2.0/1.4? If yes, I've been using 2.0 since something like February or March, and I still regularly see battery draining when usage is too heavy. I usually don't bother with switching governors, just leaving the default schedutil and allowing the CPU to downclock even when on charger.