Is there anyone from the #LinuxMobile #mobileLinux community living in Berlin with a working #Librem5 battery who would be willing to help me booting and updating my device once? Unfortunately my battery is dead and I haven't found out how to quickly get a new one - however IIUC it would boot without battery once updated to a newer firmware (https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem-5-does-not-boot-without-battery/16954/11).
What is the issue exactly with the battery?
Does not charge? No LED light?
It could be that the battery is just too drained.
It can happen if the device is for a very long time without being charged.
If that is the case it might be possible to charge it via a regular USB 2.0 connected to like a laptop.
Just to charge it enough that later it can do PD again.
You will need a laptop and a USB-A to C cable to try that.
First you need to put the phone in flash mode:
<1/n>
1 - Ensure that the phone is switched off.
2 - Turn all Hardware-Kill-Switches off
3 - Remove battery
4 - Hold volume-up
5 - Insert the USB-C cable: (red light blinks, no green light)
6 - Reinsert the battery: (red light is constantly on, the script will continue)
7 - Release volume-up
If there is a constant red LED on the Librem 5.
Then it is charging at 0,5A
Let it do that for like an hour. Just to charge the battery a bit.
Then connect it to the official charger.
<2/n>
Well, if it booted, then you can now connect it to the Librem 5 official charger and it should do power delivery negotiations and charge at more than 5v/0.5A
It might be that you need a couple of charge/discharge cycles for the battery to be ok.
There are other ways to do this, but you can check if it doing PD, with this command (at least in PureOS):
tail -n+0 /sys/class/power_supply/*/uevent
@rmader
As for the firmware, if you are on pureos, then you can check the u-boot version, by going into the mobile settings app in the app tray, then: Librem 5
If you are not on pureos you can also likely get the version with dmesg:
sudo dmesg | grep u_boot_version
To check the firmware version of the USB PD controller you can also use:
sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/tps6598x/0-003f/customer_use
@agx