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[maverick1970]

Hello all.

I am a new owner.  My wife and I bought him on ebay last fall to give to the kids for Christmas.  Well charged the battery and poop only worked for about 15 - 30 seconds.  I thought that I may have a bad battery so I made my own from the DYI battery thread found on this awesome forum.  Well that didn't work either.  I have taken my volt meter to the battery pack I made and show that it is charged showing 7.8 vdc.  I put the batt. pack in and pleo only works for about 10 - 20 seconds.   I thought I would give upgrading the software a shot.   Upgrading the software was successfuly but didn't result an any improvements.  I have read about charging the battery by wiggling it around after it turns greeen to ensure a full charge but that's not doing anything either.

what get's me is that the batt. pack shows a good charge. (6x1.2v=7.2v).  I'm getting a reading higher than 7.2 so I'm lost?  Can anyone help?

[Crewella]

Hello, and welcome!  

I can't help with the pack you made, but I can tell you that almost all of the faults I've seen in Pleos that behave that way are due to a dodgy battery, and many of those green batteries are starting to give out.  Innvo brought out a new charger with a battery reconditioning switch, which takes your old battery through a full, slow, charge/discharge cycle and has improved many older batteries.  You can get them quite cheaply from PleoWorld (and use your original adapter).  Mght be worth a try?  There is also the li-poly egg charger and battery by Ucube which is a huge improvement on the green batteries all round anyway.

Or maybe someone here can help with your home-built pack .................

Best of  luck!

PS:  I hope it's OK, I removed the duplicate thread to avoid confusion. 

[PleoPet]

For home made packs, you need to worry about the 3rd terminal. That's used to detect battery overheating using a termistor. If that isn't wired up properly, the Pleo may be shutting down after booting, thinking that the battery has overheated.

Other advice:
> I have taken my volt meter to the battery pack I made and show that it is charged showing 7.8 vdc.
That is normal. Reading a fully charged pack with a voltmeter with no load will easily be 7.6 volts or higher.
If you can't test it inside of Pleo, try placing a small load across the battery terminals (eg: a small low voltage light bulb). The voltage should drop a little from 7.8 volts, but should be well above 7.2 volts.

> I put the batt. pack in and pleo only works for about 10 - 20 seconds.
Does it move and make sounds at the start? (when you turn it on, it should take around 10 seconds to boot up the V1 software)
What happens after 10 or 20 seconds?
Does it shut down, make a noise or just stop?

If it crashes during movement, it may be draining the battery when turning on the motors. Or it could be the movement is causing loss of battery connection. If possible check the running voltage in your home made pack (or if possible the current drain)

>   I thought I would give upgrading the software a shot.
Upgrading requires that the CPU runs for a while, but the motors don't move, and IIRC it doesn't check the battery temperature.

If none of those suggestions help, try one of the SD card entertainment personalities (like Babe http://www.aibohack.com/pleo/babe.htm, or one of the others on PleoWorld)
They will use the hardware in different ways.
Good luck.

[allosaurus]

I'll point out that this happened with Olympia before her battery went completely, and now she's basically in limbo.

[maverick1970]

Hello PleoPet....

Thanks A LOT for the info.      I feel I have the thermistor soldered on correctly.  I have it on the negative side and on the metal plate.  I took it off the original green battery and reused it.  I was not concerned with the voltaged being higher than 7.2 just stating that its charge appropriate    but thank you for the input.

After putting the batt. pack in, pleo boots up and works quite well actually.  Moves around, makes sounds, makes the eating sound etc.  This only last for about 10 - 20 seconds.  As a matter of fact, it does crash during movement.  While moving, the gears sound awful like it's hard to move that whining sound you know that small electric motors make when they are struggling.  When I take the battery pack out of pleo after all this, the voltage is still reading around 7.4. 

Must be the current drain you are talking about.

Got any suggestions on how to check the running voltage/current drain? 

[PleoPet]

> I took (the thermistor) off the original green battery and reused it
That could be the problem since you say both battery packs fail the same way.
Try replacing it with a normal resistor (the guide says 8 to 10 kOhm), to at least remove that from the possibilities.

> Got any suggestions on how to check the running voltage/current drain?  
Since you are building your own battery pack, you could run wires out of the battery pack to tap into a voltmeter and/or ammeter. Detecting peaks may be tricky without better lab equipment.
You can likely diagnose it easier with an SD card.

--
Next I suggest trying one of the non-standard personalities (Eg: babe) on an SD card.
Also if you have an SD card, you can run simple programs (I have a primitive test program similar to ProbeRB/TestRB but for the older models)

For more advanced diagnostics, in general you can hook your Pleo to a USB cable and run DynoMite. However that won't work with the regular personality because it will shut down before you can hook up to a USB cable. If a motor is broken, a dumb do-nothing personality on the SD card should let the Pleo boot up, connect to Dynomite and then you can play with the motors to see which one is bad.
This can also be done with a test program run from an SD card.