FP2 reboots on mechanical pressure

Hey guys,

it’s been a long time since my last post in here. Have had my FP2 since February and I’m still a proud owner. However the phone has become more and more annoying to me in the last weeks:

Apart from occasional screen freezes (which have been discussed on this forum already but I haven’t had the time and patience to mess with the suggested workarounds yet) my phone tends to reboot on slight bending pressure. Even when I just get the phone out of my jeans’ pockets or when I sit down with the phone in my pockets, the bending sometimes is enough to make the phone reboot. In General, this happens quite often when applying slight pressure to the middle area of the back of the phone, approximately the battery area. I can reproduce it by simply putting some pressure onto the phone with my hands.

Reboots sum up to ~2-10 times a day and I don’t have the feeling any of these reboots are caused by software issues. That’s why I started this new topic instead of adding my issue to another “Random Reboot” topic.

Additional Information:

  • latest Fairphone OS 1.8.1, it also happened with earlier versions
  • I do also have the backcover issue where the rubber over the volume buttons stands off. Might be related to the reboot issue.
  • Since the update to 1.8.1, I had two situations in which my battery was wrongfully shown to run on a very low percentage until I rebooted the phone at least once. Could be caused either by the update or by hardware?

Anyone else with this issue? Any ideas?

btw: I have not yet filed a support ticket, hoping that we can find a solution in here :wink:

3 Likes

I don’t have the issue mysrlf, however I’m also not carrying the phone in my trousers’ pockets anymore.
This sounds to me as if the reboots are caused by loss of contact between battery and mainboard, because the battery doesn’t sit tight enough.
Does it get better if you fix the battery in its place, e.g. using a piece of (folded) paper?

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That was my thought too. Haven’t tried to fix the battery though… Will try to figure out a construct for that :stuck_out_tongue:

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FYI - related:

…and yes, there are also some reports that adding a piece of paper to hold the battery stops some random reboots - not sure whether pressure was ever mentioned in connection with this.

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So I just shut down the phone, put out the battery and checked everything around it. Couldn’t notice anything wrong about it. put a few layers of duct tape inside that rubber rectangle on the inner side of the back cover to maybe better hold the battery in place. Started the phone and again I have the way-too-low battery percentage. Will keep an eye on that and report back…

EDIT: Okay, it’s definitely hardware-related.

  1. Phone is on, shows low battery.
  2. I hold the phone at the top and bottom and use my fingers to press the middle softly from behind
    (so that the battery is pushed towards the back of the screen)
  3. Phone shows battery as normal until I release the pressure. Then it again tries to tell me the battery is running on values between 1 % and 12 %.

So you know what I’m talking about:

I always interpreted the paper/carboard fix as pushing the battery towards the contacts, so a small strip between the edge of the compartment that is closest to the side of the phone where the blue latches for the display are located.

2 Likes

Makes sense. Will try.

Maybe you can get this fixed when using a pair of tweezers to gently realign the spring contacts. Cleaning the contacts of the phone and battery may help But of course the easier way would be to place a piece of paper at the proper place.

Thanks for your input. The contacts all look fine and there’s nothing to move at the spring contacts though…

Actually right now I can’t even really start the phone any more as it immediately shuts down after booting due to “low power”. No matter whether I use paper strips or not (tried one layer and two layers and the battery sat quite steady in there).

That will fix the “loose battery” problem only temporarily. As the contacts will be pushed away from the battery after some time again.

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This sounds an awful lot like my FP2. It sometimes reboots upon pressure too: the battery is slightly loose in the screen-battery-cover direction, whereas it is pushed well against the contacts. I guess that’s why adding a piece of paper did not help.

I am experiencing severe battery drops as well. Up until now, I didn’t know whether those were software- or hardware-related as I’ve been playing around with the operating system (now running FP Open 16.10.0 with microG services core). However, my battery profiles look pretty much like yours.

As soon as it is suddenly draining again, I will test the hold-at-top-and-bottom-trick to manipulate the battery level. The battery drains are pretty unpredictable: I can go days without them and suddenly I can only use my phone for a few hours before the battery apparently drains. It seems to happen more often while the phone is in my pocket, which again might indicate a hardware problem.

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I think I also have this (or a similar) problem. For some days now, my FP2 reboots or shuts down when being in my pocket. I looked into the logs (e.g. /proc/last_kmsg), but there wasn’t any Kernel panic, so I think that it’s hardware-related.
I cleaned all contacts with some alcohol, and I found that the PCB of my bottom-module is slightly bent. I think the spring-contacts of the connector bent the PCB and this may now be the cause for the problem?!
Maybe anyone here can take a look at his bottom module. :slight_smile:
I’ll ask a friend of mine to swap the bottom-modules, and see if he gets reboots. :wink:

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Hi all,
I can confirm the reboot problem as well from my side. Jeans pocket pressure is one thing, a small drop (e.g. 10 cm down on the table) makes it also reboot. I also guessed it would be from the battery for a short timeframe losing contact. Annoying but not as annoying yet to take care about. But now it seems to me that it’s not only me having this issue.

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Oh, I forgot that! Today in the morning, I dropped my FP2 while switching the alarm off from ~20 cm. It rebooted, that’s why I opened it immediately :wink:

… Except when the phone reboots in your pocket without You realising. Then You won’t be reachable until You enter your PIN.

Or if You quickly need to Check for train connections and it takes minutes to turn on the phone, especially when after The first reboot The screen does not respond and You have to reboot again :wink:

To the people that responded today: do you get the sudden battery drains that Husker and I are experiencing as well? Just to pinpoint whether we suffer from the same (hardware?) issue.

I don’t really mind the reboots as much as the unexpected battery drains.

retsifp, thanks for your input. Will check my bottom module as well tonight. I’m curious as to what will happen to your friend’s phone!

So, I don’t have the issue, but if putting pressure on the battery causes a contact problem, how about adding a sheet of paper or something underneath it to make it stay closer to the back cover?

OK, we swapped bottom modules, and it didn’t change anything! :sweat:
His bottom-module-PCB was bent similar to mine, so this obviously doesn’t matter.

I checked it before, and I thought this gap should be ok…

…but I gave it a shot with three layers of 80 g/m²-paper:

And that seemed to be it! :tada:
Reboots are gone so far, and some drop tests didn’t lead to reboots. :relaxed:

Thanks for the tips here! :slight_smile:

10 Likes

So in the last two weeks, I tried several ways to insert paper and none of them really worked. However, a few days ago, reboots ceased to happen and I had only two random reboots from then – no paper or anything inside, basically just the plain unchanged phone! I’m still worried that it will happen again so I contacted support. They will send me a replacement cover, hopefully that solves the problem. Thanks everyone for your input!