My DIY Intel 11 Framework laptop has a couple of annoying problems. The coin battery issue everyone knows about.
The second issue is the USB C modules. After having the power unit turn off a couple of times, I moved the USB C modules around. I ended up having two on the left side of the laptop. Every now and then, the power unit fails when the USB port stops working. The solution has been to move the plug to the second port and then it will work once again. Yesterday it was plugged into the lower USB C port and it failed. Moved it to the upper USB port and it now works again. I have had to reverse this order more than a few time and not a clue why it fails or why it will work again simply by moving the power cord to the adjacent USB C port.
I use Framework’s charger. On the right side I use a usb-c port for a VAVA USB C Hub into which I have plugged in a mini-sd card, an external 500Meg SSD and an RJ45 cable. I do have the BIOS set for 82% on the battery.
Late to reply, but as a complete layman, your explanation is beyond my understanding. What I do comprehend is that sometimes one USB C fails and when I move the power to the other USB C port, it works again. For example, today the port I normally use for the periph hub (SSD, Ethernet, etc.) failed. Swapped the power cord and the hub and VOILA, both work again. I assume that if it fails again, swapping back again will also work, meaning that both ports will be reset.
My guess is that it is the VAVA USB C hub and the things you have plugged in. It is possible the USB hub is pulling too much power, and so the board is shutting the line down. I would not be surprised if this was occurring at times when you are having a lot of ethernet activity, and the ssd is being used heavily. (Downloading a large file to the SSD, for example)
Can you try to be mindful of when you are having this issue? It would be helpful in figuring out what the root of the problem is.
Well, the power plug is the standard Framework one. The VAVA hub has a 500 meg SSD for external backup only, an ethernet cable and a mini-SD card. That’s all that is plugged in there. This all happened yesterday (May 16th). The activity was booting up the computer, when nothing was running except startup of Windows 11.
Aaargh. Double checked, known issue with this hub if you have hard drives or memory card readers connected to the hub, and you disconnect the power from the Power Delivery port, all of the mounted drives and cards get instantly ejected. Of course this causes a raft of “not ejected properly” warnings on your screen and will ruin any file transfers or card downloads that are taking place.
No idea if this applies in my case as I was not disconnecting cables at all when the problem occured but makes me want to look around for a different hub.
Sometimes a state change (i.e. low power mode) on devices plugged or integrated into USBC hubs have this ripple effect that basically floods the bus with messages and eventually a controller just gives up on that port for the sake of maintaining the others.
Fully power cycling and reconnecting often times resets these conditions and the hampster wheel starts all over again. I am always a little cautious of the less expensive hubs that try to do too much because they just are not as robust from a firmware standpoint.
Oddly enough the cheapie SD card readers have a habit of hangups at boot time in a lot of machines for some reason. Probably because of how they show up to the BIOS.
Thanks for the heads up. I do not know if that is what happened to me or if the VAVA is at fault. What I posted above is what reviewers said about the periph. What I do know is that by changing from the left side to the right side (or the reverse) USB-C ports on the backside of the laptop, everything is reset and all works as it should. It is just a PITA, but the fix is as simple as you say: reconnect and in my case that means the other port. Go figure.