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[DarkStar2k]

Hi all,

As you all know I recently acquired a Pleo from a Goodwill. He came with a bad battery pack that I am getting a replacement for from RedWoodsMama. In the meantime I hacked a new battery pack for him from some NiMH cells I bought. I quickly discovered he did have another issue in that he would do the random freezes even with a full charge.

Being the hacker that I am I was able to get Dynomite running so I could actually watch the logs to see what was going on. Here is what I saw in the logs right before a freeze.

LL SHUTDOWN: TEMPERATURE = 59!
Shake sensor is active.
POWERING DOWN!

I started trying to check the Battery_Temp and it was giving strange values that were not possible. I removed the pack and checked the thermistor and it was reading perfectly normal.

As an experiment I started sending a command early in the startup sequence to disable the battery temp sensor. Everytime I did this he would run perfectly fine until I either turned him off or he ran out of batteries.

I then downloaded the development kit and figured out how to make a simple startup script that would disable the battery temp sensor at startup. Put that on a blank SD Card and he has been running fine ever since. (With the SD Card in of course)

I am fairly sure that my Pleo's battery temp sensor circuits are faulty so this was the only option I had. I would be happy to upload the startup script I made for any others with the sudden freeze syndrome.

Darkstar2k

[Jamie Clay]

Please DO upload your startup script - I would love to test it on my sick Pleo that may have the same issue with the temp sensor.

Thanks!

Jamie

[mweed]

The script has been uploaded and can be found in the downloads section: http://bobthepleo.com/forums/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=77

Since it's a pretty simple script, I would think it should work for the other Ugobe OSes as well, but I have no way to test.

And I know this may sound silly DarkStar2k, but with this pleo's "history", did you try thoroughly cleaning the thermistor contact on the battery and inside the pleo (or checking your connections on your remade battery to make sure it's making a good, solid contact?  Because if the thermistor is good, and the pleo is getting bad data, and since the pleo is measuring resistance, a bad contact could easily result in wrong readings.  But then again, yeah, there could be physical problems with the circuitry as well.  But cleaning has sure seemed to fix battery issues in the past.

And since you're hacking the battery pack anyway, you could try replacing the thermistor with a plain resistor and see if the readings still fluctuate . . .

[Jamie Clay]

This script works on my Pleo!   Thank you for your sleuthing!

Here is his second full test - note how I've hot wired him to a good solid 7.2 battery

http://youtu.be/79YGlAUe3Fw