Anyone know anything about the Sentio Superbook? (Pibook Pro) \ VOGONS

Anyone know anything about the Sentio Superbook? (Pibook Pro)

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First post, by SteveC

Posted on 2022-07-20, 13:56

SteveC Offline

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Location: Rayleigh, Essex, UK

Hi all,

I've picked up a great condition Sentio Superbook (aka the PiBookPro) but the battery is completely dead and not charging.

I've managed to 'jump start' the battery and have manually charged it, but it's not giving out any power, not taking any in - the protection circuitry needs somehow resetting. If I bypass the protection circuitry then it runs just fine off the battery but it won't charge it in this state, and I don't want to disassemble the "laptop" every time I want to charge it 😀

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Steve

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/StevesTechShed
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SteveTechShed

Reply 1 of 2, by SteveC

Posted on 2022-07-20, 21:41

SteveC Offline

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Joined: 2017-11-25, 22:05
Location: Rayleigh, Essex, UK

I've been playing around and researching the charging chip (almost this https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/bq30z554-r1 … 252FBQ30Z554-R1) and it's awful - you can't connect via I2C to reenable it as it's SHA protected with the password a secret, and it even blows a fuse (resistor) when it's decided the battery has failed so no chance of revival!

Even repairing the fuse didn't help as:

"Permanent Fail Safety Features
The FUSE pin can be used to blow an in-line fuse to permanently disable the battery pack from charging or
discharging. Upon a Permanent Fail event trigger, critical system information is written to non-volatile memory to
simplify failure analysis."

And you can't log in to the chip to reset the status.

What an awful design. I might make a new port on it and recharge the battery directly from an external source. Bit risky though with then having no protection circuit...

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/StevesTechShed
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SteveTechShed

Reply 2 of 2, by SteveC

Posted on 2022-07-23, 14:44

SteveC Offline

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Posts: 463
Joined: 2017-11-25, 22:05
Location: Rayleigh, Essex, UK

With a bit of a bodge I worked around the multiple blown fuses and it works!

It's not a great experience to be honest... It's just a bit laggy most of the time. I'm trying to get DeX to work on it now but I need a USB C hub with HDMI.