V5 Battery Issue - Humming Brain

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I was hoping that someone may have some suggestions, but I fear that we have lost yet another V5 battery. Ironically, this happened when I was trying to explore the battery medic. I use the word “trying” because I never even got to open the battery medic for this battery.

In order to familiarize myself with battery medic I grabbed an unused brain and a spare battery, directly off the charger. When I connected to the V5 Firmware Utility (v1.3.0) it recommended a update to the brain from 1.0.12. The update seemed to go fine, but after rebooting the brain the firmware utility still registered 1.0.12 and wanted to update. It did this one more time until successfully updating to 1.0.13. At this point it required an update to the power chip, which seemed successful… at first.

I was pulled away for a minute, but when I returned to test out battery medic, the brain was frozen with a few vertical columns of blank pixels on the display. Rebooting the brain only causes it to freeze at various stages, all with display issues. Eventually I noticed an audible hum coming from the brain. I thought that I had lost a brain, but it works perfectly fine with other batteries and the battery in question causes the same effect on other brains.

The battery (model 19245AT) shows different LED codes in different situations:

  1. If you just press the button on it, it shows 4 green (a full charge )

  2. If you connect to a charger, you see a single red slow flash (charge error)

  3. If connected to a brain, it shows 4 green LED when the button is pressed, but the brain is humming and non-functional. (If cabled to a computer, the computer will sometimes signal that a new device has been connected, but it is not recognized as a V5 brain.)

  4. If connected to a charger and the brain, it shows 3 solid & 1 flashing green LED (charging, but <100%) for a while, then the single slow red LED again. Also, the hum from the brain reduces in volume while the battery is connected to the charger

So alas, I cannot connect this battery to the battery medic as it wont boot a brain, but its behavior is interesting enough that I thought I’d post about.

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@jpearman may be able to help.

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sounds like that battery has some serious issues, but I have no idea what’s wrong. I would not keep connecting it to a brain if the brain is then making unusual sounds, you will probably end up damaging the brain.

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Agreed… I am letting the battery sit (and hopefully loose some charge). Every few days I’m going to briefly check it with a broken-LCD brain and see if the computer detects it or if it surprisingly starts working. (I’d like to see what the battery medic says).

Realistically though… the battery is toast. and I should probably just forget about it.

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