Help with charging

shmobile · 11-05-03, 12:09 PM

This has probably been answered before, but I can't seem to find a thread with my exact situation.

First of all, I have always charged my Axim on the Dell supplied cradle/AC adapter. I have used it while connected to an aftermarket AC adapter as well as a cig. lighter adapter. I never took notice if the after market adapters charged the battery or not.

I am in a situation now where I don't have my Dell cradle/ac adapter available. When I turn on my Axim, it show the battery at 0%, and warns of going into sleep mode. When I plug in my aftermarket ac adapter, it says it's charging, but even when plugged in overnight, it is still at 0%.

I now have it plugged in (for several hours) to the ac adapter as well as a USB cable, but it still won't go past 0%.

Has anyone experienced this situation? Is it because the main battery went too low that now the aftermarket adapters won't charge it? Non load voltage from both adapters is at least 5.4v, so it seems they put out enought voltage. The rating of the ac adapter is 400ma. Is this enough to charge? Maybe that's the problem.

Has anyone used a generic rat shack power adapter to charge?

Thanks in advance!

Sean

doogald · 11-05-03, 12:48 PM

Was the unit powered donw while charging? You might want to do that if not. Also, if that is impossible, try removing all SD or CF cards and turn the backlight off to make the power draw as little as possible.

I have one of those 9V emergency chargers that will only charge the battery if the unit is powered off.

shmobile · 11-05-03, 12:58 PM

It was off in both cases with no cards inserted.

Sean

shmobile · 11-05-03, 02:24 PM

One more thing that I didn't mention. The battery charging screen says "Status: charging" but the orange light on the on/off button is not on. Isn't it supposed to be orange if the unit is charging?

Sean

doogald · 11-05-03, 02:45 PM

I think that it's the 400 mA charger, Sean. The Dell charger specs are 2410 mA. You'll probably have to get a bigger charger.

11-05-03, 02:47 PM

Not enough juice!

I would stick with the 5.4 Volts and the full 2410 milliAmps Dell specs out for this.
You can fudge the amps up/down a little, but 400 mA is too little.

JakeRich · 11-05-03, 03:38 PM

With only 400 ma available, it's actually depleting the battery faster than it can charge it. We have noted with some of the USB connector chargers that below about 70% battery strength a weak charger actually discharges the battery. Apparently what happens is that the charging unit sees the voltage on the connector and assumes it has the 2410 ma available that comes from the Dell unit. It starts to charge the battery, but the charging circuits start to draw a lot more power at 70% or so. The power supply can't handle it so the charging circuit starts to draw power from the battery to make up the difference. As a result the battery dies quickly.

So, get a charger with at least 2+ amp output at 5.4 v and you should be ok.

shmobile · 11-05-03, 03:49 PM

Wow! 2.4 amp. No wonder it won't charge!!!

Thanks for all the advice.

I guess I'll have to wait to get back to my office to charge it up again.

Sean

PeteW · 11-05-03, 05:32 PM

Since the Dell charger is rated at 5.4V and 2410mA, I decided to buy the car charger from them thinking it would be rated the same.

The rating of the car charger from Dell is 5V and 800mA. I have never had a problem with operation in the car running GPS and full backlight and eventually it does come up to fully charged. I would guess that 800mA is the smallest you should go for.