External Battery caused brick ?

[Slade]

Hi all,

I built myself a rather large external powerpack for my psp. It consists of 4 D Cell 9000mAh rechargable batteries. Each one is 1.2v, giving me in theory 4.8v, in reality about 5.5v. I get a good 30hrs of gameplay from it.

I used the battery quite a bit on my original US v1.5 psp. When the downgrader was released I wanted to see what all the fuss was about with the web browser and the like.

So I charged my psp, ran it from the mains power and went to update it to V2.0. It failed, and I ended up with a brick. I wasn't happy. Sony USA & AU have refused to help and want to charge me $$ to fix it.

I'm curious to know whether the external battery pack could have caused damage to the psp ? Thus causing the failed firmware update.

Note, I never ran any apps that wrote to the flash at all, so no permanent changes were made prior to the psp update attempt.

[EnTiTy]

Hi all,

I built myself a rather large external powerpack for my psp. It consists of 4 D Cell 9000mAh rechargable batteries. Each one is 1.2v, giving me in theory 4.8v, in reality about 5.5v. I get a good 30hrs of gameplay from it.

I used the battery quite a bit on my original US v1.5 psp. When the downgrader was released I wanted to see what all the fuss was about with the web browser and the like.

So I charged my psp, ran it from the mains power and went to update it to V2.0. It failed, and I ended up with a brick. I wasn't happy. Sony USA & AU have refused to help and want to charge me $$ to fix it.

I'm curious to know whether the external battery pack could have caused damage to the psp ? Thus causing the failed firmware update.

Note, I never ran any apps that wrote to the flash at all, so no permanent changes were made prior to the psp update attempt.
hmmmmmm i doubt the bat would cause that problem sounds like a corrupt registry file that contains you user information network settings user name
etc at what point did the update fail ? sorry to her your psp died :( guarentee ?

[Slade]

The update failed about 30% of the way through. It retried about 9 times. After that I realised it wasn't going to get anywhere, so I powered the unit off. Sure, powering it off bricked the thing, but there was little else do to.

As for warranty. It was a USA based model bought here in Aus. I've spoken to both Sony USA and Aus, and neither will repair it under warranty as they claim firmware upgrades aren't covered by the warranty process. The original vendor doesn't offer a warranty as it's an imported model.

Net result : $450AU lost.

At this point I don't want to use the external battery again, just in case it caused it. I can't see how, the psp should regulate the voltage down to an even 5v without a problem, but I can't be 100% sure.

At least another thread has info that says to reset back to factory settings and it should fix the problems.

[EnTiTy]

The update failed about 30% of the way through. It retried about 9 times. After that I realised it wasn't going to get anywhere, so I powered the unit off. Sure, powering it off bricked the thing, but there was little else do to.

As for warranty. It was a USA based model bought here in Aus. I've spoken to both Sony USA and Aus, and neither will repair it under warranty as they claim firmware upgrades aren't covered by the warranty process. The original vendor doesn't offer a warranty as it's an imported model.

Net result : $450AU lost.

At this point I don't want to use the external battery again, just in case it caused it. I can't see how, the psp should regulate the voltage down to an even 5v without a problem, but I can't be 100% sure.

At least another thread has info that says to reset back to factory settings and it should fix the problems.

hmmmmmmmm intresting they dont cover there own upgrades that sucks
does it state this in the upgrade process at any time or in the manual if not then u hve a recourse for ction via a small claims court

what you could have done is used ohms law and added a resistor to mke sure the voltage is accurate or used a diode to keep dropping 0,7v until the required voltage is gained.

another possibility is a corrupt update eboot.

like the idea of a homebrew powerbrick btw nice going ;)

[mrfixit]

right ere we go my original PSP power pack run at 5.40v my USB power lead is 5.13v so i would of thought that it is not your power pack that you made.
also the battery is around 3.6 so this says that there must be regulating circuit
corrupt update eboot as EnTiTy said is the more then likely

[Slade]

Thanks for the info.

I'll give the powerpack another shot over the next few weeks and then see what happens when I try to upgrade. If it won't upgrade (or looks like it's not 100% working), then I'll reset the settings back to factory. There isn't much on the psp that can't be fixed within a few minutes anyway.

For those that are interested, here is a shot of the external powerpack in question. Apologies if the image is somewhat large.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a266/Slade_au/DSC00178.jpg

[nonzero]

Hernia time :p

[Slade]

Hehe.

It's surprisingly light. It weighs much less than an equivalent SLA battery. Go to your local supermarket and grab a pack of 4 D cell batteries, it weighs as much as that. It also has a 1m (3 feet for the yankies) power cable on it.

Plenty of cable to leave it in my bag, on the floor, on the desk. And it keeps the psp working for a good week or two without needing a recharge. :D