Soo, been using my framework for almost a year without issue. Today, the laptop powers off and won’t power back on. Charge light on the back left port is white. Changing to the back right port is also white. When pressing power button, the light around the power button does not come on. The charge light changes to blue for a second then back to white when I first press the power button. If I press the power button a second time, it changes to red for a second, then back to white. I have reseated RAM, tried with a single stick (swapping the 2 sticks I have as the single). I have reseated the SSD. I have reseated the video cable, mid plate cable, power button cable and battery. I have tried with the dedicated GPU and just the fan/m.2 module. I have tried the Bios reset, by pressing the mid plate switch 10 times at 2 seconds each press. I have also left the device sitting for 30 minutes after pressing the power button, in case it needs to map memory. I have left the battery out and power unplugged for 30 minutes. I have even tried plugging in a keyboard, with the mid plate off, power cable plugged in, and battery pulled. No change. I put in a support ticket with framework, but there is no telling when they might get back to me. The framework phone number is just message stating that they don’t offer phone support. If anyone has any recommendations or ideas that I might have missed, I would appreciate it greatly!
Sorry to hear that. Best of luck getting things resolved. The only thing that I can think of, and given all that you have tried it feels like a long shot, would be to pull the nvme and try to boot off of a USB drive. I assume that you have tried each ram stick in each slot. Again, best of luck getting the machine back on its feet.
Tried booting off an Ubuntu live stick with the SSD removed and tried both ram sticks in slot 1. Still no change. Thanks for the recommendations though! I also tried seeing if I could get a post screen with everything removed (SSD, ram, wifi adapter, expansion bay modules), but still no change.
If you’re really in the mood for some tinkering, I know the ability to see EC’s console output is there by connecting to some pads on the mobo. (An example of it for FL13 is pictured here.) Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any guides on how to do it, and you would need to find those pads on the FL16 mobo.
In that case short of getting a different ram kit (and that’s a long shot as the probability of both sticks dying at the same time is not that high) it’s probably time for an rma.
Edit: If your laptop is under warranty, do contact the support ASAP to get RMA going for it. As fun as debugging this may be, probability of success if less than from asking for replacement under warranty.
NOTE: I dunno wtf I’m talking about. I’m not an electrical engineer, and I never in my life had any experience close to using a UART interface. I aspire to maybe slowly become better at this, but right now I am less than a beginner. I wish someone else could provide some more pointers, like @DHowett
According to schematics, there’s a connector on the motherboard labeled JSWDB, which is connected to the UART port of the Embedded Controller on pins 8 and 9.
I don’t want to open my FL16 right now, and I couldn’t find the connector on any pictures of the motherboard in the internet. (This is a good high-res one.) On FL13 it’s situated somewhere in the top right corner, so I’d look somewhere close to there in the vicinity of the fingerprint reader ribbon connector.
A good start would be disconnect everything, all USB slot card, nvme ssd, wifi, battery, and use just one RAM chip and see if if gets any further in the boot process.
Then try the other RAM chip, in case the first one is bad.
If it still does not boot when the PSU is connected to one of the side USB-C slot cards, then its most likely the mainboard is the problem.
Only FW support can help then.
Accessing the EC console port does not actually help much in cases like this, except to find out if the EC detects the power button or not.
