I bought an Anker GaN PowerCore or Anker 733 with the aim of having one wall wart to rule them all. For those unfamiliar, it is a combined power bank/wall adapter with 2 USB-C and 1 USB-A out, intended for a total of 65W out either plugged in or from battery alone. There are some finicky limits on combination output, but my issues are far simpler than that.
For those confused about what this is (Anker decided that it needed two names, the “733” and the “GaNPrime PowerCore 65W”):
Anker 733 // GaNPrime PowerCore 65W
Essentially, this device intermittently functions as a simply 65W wall charger, and fails in several confusing ways. First, the behavior described is completely independent of the charger being plugged in or on battery alone. Second, it is also independent of which USB-C port the laptop is hooked to (the high output USB-C port can also charge the powerbank) OR other devices attached. Third, I have HDMI and USBC on the left and USBC and USBA on the right; the behavior is constant between both USBC ports. The laptop is running up to date Fedora (maybe a week since last update) with an AMD 7840 and the 61 Wh battery. When plugged into the USBC laptop charging port, the laptop rapidly (~1 Hz) cycles between charging and not charging until unplugged from the charger. The charger itself has one button, which is essentially a “push to make the LEDs show you how much juice is in the battery” button. If the laptop is left to drain below 5%, then the rapid cycling stops AND the laptop will charge up to full from either USB-C port.
Since the laptop can take more than what this charger can output (charger is max 65W from any port plugged in and 45W from its battery), it can’t be overloading the framework laptop charging capacity. Indeed, WHEN the laptop/charger decides to charge, it does so quite quickly. My fear is that unless in “shutoff mode”, the laptop cannot determine whether to charge or charge FROM the battery bank. Troubleshooting that issue is confusing because the issue persists from both of the charger’s USBC ports (but not its USB-A port), since only one of the two USBC ports is listed as able to charge the charger’s internal battery. If my theory on the laptop rapidly cycling between trying to charge and be charged by the charger, then plugging into the charger USBC port which cannot accept charging should solve the issue, but does not.
Indeed, as I have typed this post, the laptop charged from the offending charger from 5 to 30% after refusing to charge the laptop as the charge drained from 10 to 5%. There is clearly a software switch that I can’t see which is being flipped, but I don’t know what that is or how to interact with it. I would be fine with having a dedicated USBC charging port so long as the charging behavior is predictable and I can minimize the amount of stuff that I carry.
Any help is appreciated.