[mobby_6kl]

Well, FWIIW, I ended up ordering the Chuwi Ubook. About $250 for the Atom 8/256GB isn’t bad.  The pen is N-trig type I understand which isn’t perfect but should work well enough. Let’s see how this works out, it’s on the way right now from Banggood.

[mobby_6kl]

david wrote:

if it helps somebody I’m using the 20000mah powerbank from xiaomi ”mi powerbank 3 pro” 45w and works like a charm… it charges the cubemix very fast and no problem till now

Yeah, thanks! Many of the larger power banks (20Ah) seem to support >30W out over USB-PD which should definitely work great. I just didn’t want a huge brick to carry with me, the smaller ones are just about small enough that I can carry them in the bag or even in the pocket if I think I’ll need it.

 

Here’s a test I just ran.

Tablet set to TPD Down in BIOS, using live Debian system because I screwed around with power plans and XTU too much by now. Brightness at around 25%, connected to access point around 2m away and playing a 10 hours of underwater video from BBC.

So it lasted almost exactly 4 hours on the powerbank and then another 3:15 on the battery (which definitely needs to be calibrated). It’d be great to last 8 hours without the power bank but still, not too bad. I think this youtube test was pretty hard on it, as it had to run wifi and decoding all the time, it would probably last forever reading a book or typing stuff.

Another interesting thing is that the power bank is 37Wh while the standard Cube battery is (supposedly) 33Wh. I didn’t have a way to measure USB-C current but I tested the powerbank at 5V and 2A and it put out around 6500mAh, or 33Wh according to the USB tester. So that’s actually a higher efficiency than Blitzwolf is claiming (85%). And considering the Cube battery is around 2 years old, that result wasn’t too bad either, I thought i’d be shot by now.

[mobby_6kl]

david wrote:

mobby_6kl wrote:

I might do some experiments now that I’m quarantined and have nothing better to do ?

any update on this? i’m also interested on power bank for cubemix

The update is that the original Forsee SSD died and I forgot about it for a while 🙂

But I now tried charging it from 58% with no overclocking and even locked it down to 400Mhz but it still won’t charge. As riceart said, it’s probably just not enough and you need 15V @2A or something. But it does extend the battery life significantly so I’m not too upset.

—

As for the SSD, if anyone’s curious the writes became extremely slow and reads would get stuck sometimes to the point it could take a minute to unlock the tablet. Eventually it failed to boot, but I did have a backup image thankfully.

I put in a Transcend MTS430S 256GB and it’s super snappy again.

[mobby_6kl]

I think I’ve had something similar happen a few times, it seemed that the undocking it from the keyboard for a moment helped calm it down. But this only happened a 2-3 times so I’m not 100% sure.

You might be able to find a replacement keyboard on Ebay but I haven’t seen anything. A simple USB/bluetooth keyboard could be a cheap temporary solution at least.

[mobby_6kl]

riceart wrote:

18W from power delivery is too small. You will need at last 24W power output. Preferable 30W.

So you’re like 50% correct. I decided to give it a try anyway when it was on sale on Amazon cheaper than from China.

While it does not charge the tablet, it is detected properly when I plug it in and it does keep the tablet from discharging. Which is really good enough for me, since all I wanted was to extend the battery life. Also this is at maximum TPD/turbo settings, perhaps at 4W or lower settings it could even charge it. I might do some experiments now that I’m quarantined and have nothing better to do 🙂

[mobby_6kl]

Probably way too late but this sounds like the typical symptoms of an over-discharged battery where the circuit will refuse to charge it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USiHsce4vbU

The fix is to charge it manually a little bit with a power supply (or replace it, obviously). Could be something else too but this seems to be the most typical issue.

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