[Hugh]

Just to make it clear, I measured the voltage on the connector on the board, not on the AC power supply.  So the board was getting 12+v.  I don’t know how it is supposed to be distributed on the motherboard nor appropriate test points so I didn’t do other measurements.  Recommendations welcome!

[Hugh]

My Cube Mix Plus has a problem like this one.

The battery was no longer charging when AC power supply was connected.

The system continued to work until the battery was discharged.

No sign of life since then.  The LED is not on.

I tried another AC power supply.  No difference.

I left it on my shelf for several months — I didn’t know what to do and I didn’t have time to do it.

Just now, I tried a USB C charger (designed for another computer — it might not be powerful enough).  LED doesn’t light.

I opened up the Cube Mix Plus.  I measured 12+V between the terminals of the barrel jack.

I don’t know where else to test.

Does anyone have a circuit diagram?  This thing doesn’t seem to have an FCC ID so I cannot look on the FCC database.

Any suggestions for how to proceed?

[Hugh]

Normally the FCC ID is on the same label that declares power inputs and outputs, etc.  I looked at our Mix Plus and saw no FCC ID.  I guess that they never intended to export it to the US.

Sorry for sending you on a wild goose chase.

[Hugh]

Ouch!

I haven’t looked, but if the model has been approved by the (US) FCC, the computer’s label will have an FCC ID.  You can use that ID to look up the description at the FCC site.  That usually includes some kind of circuit schematic.

I don’t think that it will be easy to repair (but I’m no expert):

• it looks as if two discrete SMT components were badly fried.  I would guess that they were part of the power supply
• the board itself may be damaged: this board is surely multi-layer and it is possible to burn the interior layers
• the first picture hints at damage to the chip above the worst spot.  Some other nearby spots look as if thy might be damaged.  That may just be the way the photo came out.
• chips that look OK can be damaged by such an event

The fact that it wasn’t plugged in is interesting.  Notice the silk-screened lettering “BAT” near the burn’t area.  That probably stands for “battery”.

I wonder if you can find someone with Cube Mix Plus with, say, a cracked screen and buy their computer for parts?  I’d bet that a cracked screen is the most common death of these computers.

[Hugh]

Thanks for pointing this out.

[Hugh]

Nero wrote:

so in a nut shell whats the update for ….. windows OS or bios .. ive been having issues with the bios … i just cant seem to connect my computer to a projector …also if i use the wifi connectivity it doent run smoothly … the projections on the second screen drags and lags behind … will the update solve my issues ??

I don’t think that it is an update.  I think that it is an initial load for everything.  But I see no reason to try it so I don’t know for sure.

[Hugh]

Tom wrote:

I cant download the 2018 image either. Would be great to see the file here on techtablets.

As I reported above, the initial part of the new image is identical to the initial part of the old on on TechTablets.  That makes me guess that there is no difference.

[Hugh]

The live .iso systems I use do not have persistence.  It used to be that the live USBs did have persistence (in the pre UEFI days) but were slightly more work to install.  And they had odd bugs.

I have installed Ubuntu onto a portable HDD but never ended up using it beyond testing whether it worked.  Windows used to forbid installing onto a portable drive but my understanding is that they’ve changed how licensing is verified and now allow this.

I don’t really need persistence.  I just scp stuff to/from another computer on my LAN.  Of course that requires me to type in the WPA2 password (mine is long).

The most irritating thing is that the content of my live USB sticks get destroyed by Windows if I let it boot.  That happens all too easily if you don’t hit the right keystroke at the right time during the POST step.  So I treat them as disposable.

[Hugh]

@brad:

I assumed that he knew how to boot a distro from USB.  His gparted is running from a bootable usb stick and is a LINUX system.   He called it a “Gparted live USB”.  I guess it must be https://gparted.org/livecd.php

Whenever I need to use gparted in this fashion, I just boot Fedora or Ubuntu live USBs and run gparted (I have to “sudo dnf install gparted” on Fedora but that’s easy).

Does Manjaro not make a live USB image available?  The majaro pages don’t make this very clear.

[Hugh]

akasection wrote:

Hugh wrote:

akasection wrote:

no no no.. I just use the “Install” when boot the android, and follow the wizard. that’s all. And it would be dual-boot (just like ubuntu alongside windows)

In that case, I don’t see how a Windows update would have any effect.

Not directly, it’s just after update, my Android OS can’t suspend/sleep at all, which is I can’t do ‘touchscreen enable’ hack. ( ctrl+alt+1 and then echo mem > /sys/power/state)

So how could a Windows update affect Android, directly or indirectly?

If the update came from Cube, you could imagine them slipping in a UEFI firmware update.  But, as I understand it, you are referring to an update from Microsoft.  I don’t see a path of influence, direct or indirect, from that update to Android.

Hmm.  What’s booting Android?  The UEFI firmware or the Windows boot manager (or whatever it is called)?  I always boot from the UEFI firmware.  If you use the Windows boot manager, I guess that there is some chance that it does some initializing that might have changed between releases.

For what it is worth, Fedora 28 Linux works pretty well on our Cube Mix Plus.  But we don’d do multi-touch things because we use it as a notebook.  The cameras don’t work under Fedora but I haven’t investigated why.

[Hugh]

akasection wrote:

no no no.. I just use the “Install” when boot the android, and follow the wizard. that’s all. And it would be dual-boot (just like ubuntu alongside windows)

In that case, I don’t see how a Windows update would have any effect.

[Hugh]

I’ve never tried any of this so my advice isn’t worth much.

In what way are you running Android under Windows?  Are you using Hyper V or some other virtualization?  How touch events get to the guest OS is unknown to me but ought to involve some device virtualization, something with a lot of ways of going wrong (I would imagine).  The appropriate Android driver for touch under Windows might well be different from the Android driver when Android is running on the bare metal.

If you run Android stand-alone, not under Windows, then any driver problems cannot be Windows problems.  Then you just have pure Android problems.  Sounds simpler to me.

Some folks are complaining that Windows updates break the pen driver (I think) and that the fix is to find the old driver and re-install it.  I assume that you are not talking about pen input so this is irrelevant.  I haven’t tried a pen yet.

[Hugh]

How are you running Android?  Dual boot with Windows?  Android under Windows (I guess that’s the only way that the Windows drivers would matter)?

[Hugh]

I imagine that replacing the drive is the right thing to do, but I don’t know for sure.

I cannot tell from the blkdiscard manual whether it can be used on a partition or if it only works on a whole drive.  I assume you asked it to do the whole disk.

I don’t know what a drive looks like to software after it has been wiped.  Does it look as if it is full of 0x00 or does it generate errors when software tries to read it or something else that I haven’t thought of?  Certainly it would not contain any partition information.

Once you do a blkdiscard, I recommend rebooting the live USB stick.  I’m not sure that the Linux kernel would reread the partition table if you don’t.  After rebooting, gparted should see an unpartitioned drive (and not hang).  If it hangs, that would seem to be a hardware problem.

I/O errors show up in dmesg output.  Even if gparted hangs, you should be able to start a terminal and use it to look at dmesg output.

[Hugh]

FUCKTECHTABLET wrote:

No, buy a galaxy book 10.6 refurbish

The Galaxy, new, costs five times what I paid for a used Cube Mix Plus.  And it has an SSD that is too small.

The Galaxy comes from a manufacturer that provides better support.  The screen is a nicer size (aspect ratio).  It’s probably better made.

[Author]

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