have you tried trickle mode?
I did try trickle mode and got it to work for about 30 seconds and then never again
Iām trying to narrow it down a bit here just to make sure I understand better
-
The trickle mode only activated for 30 seconds on the power bank ( unplugged from your FW16 )?
-
The trickle mode activated and after you plugged your FW16, the power bank only charged for 30 seconds?
The latter
The laptop only accepted charge for 30 seconds, the power bank still continued to be in trickle mode
It has not worked since so Iāve opened a ticket with support.
I talked to support for about 2 weeks and theyāve just said that they are working on fixes with PD issues
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I have sent an email to Anker Support (even if its probably useless) with the issues on charging the laptop and how other Anker products work as expected.
Some interesting behavior with the 737 and an Anker dock.
I have an Anker docking station I plug my FW13 into for video, power, Ethernet, and other peripherals. This āone cable solutionā dock charges my FW13 at about 60 to 70 watts through the main USB-C cable, it also charges other devices like headphones, game controllers, tablets, and pretty much anything else with a USB-C port throught that main USB-C cableā¦ except for the Anker 737. With the Anker 737 it wonāt accept a charge and will attempt to charge the docking station at 0.1 watts.
Could it be possible that itās more to do with the Anker 737 itself and not entirely the fault of the FW16?
TL;DR
Anker 737 wonāt charge from an Anker docking station. Is the FW16 really the whole problem?
Anker Dock Link
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That makes this even more interesting, maybe it has trouble communicating with devices that can act as docks? It wouldnāt completely explain everything but thatās all I can come up with.
What motherboard do you have?
I can confirm that my Anker Prime and Anker PowerCore Reserve both work on the Framework.
Does the cpu by chance throttle to .5Ghz when charging with a pd charger over 100w?
Iāve detailed my issues with some related issues in this post.
Issue is still present with fully upto date BIOS and fedora 40.
I donāt really see performance changes since the battery just doesnāt work correctly.
That is good, must be a seperate bug then.
With the issue I was referring to, the cpu pins at .5Ghz, and you definitely notice the drop in performance. (happens across windows, ubuntu, fedora)
I brought it up since the charger will also charger very slowly when this happens.
For whatever itās worth, Iāve plugged my FW 16 into a solar panel outputting only 3-8W and the FW didnāt do anything strange.
Trickle mode worked for me. I was able to get the laptop to pull almost 90w from the anker 737 battery. If it matters, iām also running the latest bios with a 60% charge limit since my laptop is more like a desktop right now.
Interesting, I tried the trickle mode and it didnāt have any affect and I was on the latest bios. I may try it again later, however I am probably going to bite the bullet and get the anker prime powerbank since it confirm works and is high speed and capacity.
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Weird, I also noticed that even when not in trickle mode, if the usb port is active on the battery pack, it charges the laptop at a reasonable power. Since this seems to be an issue with the battery pack, I wonder if thereās way to update its firmware.
Ok,
I think Iāve gotten closer to where the issue is
The Anker 737 Power Bank (PowerCore 24K) - a1289 which implements Anker PIQ 3.0 and that internally supports USB PD 3.0 along with some other modes
Anker claims that the power bank supports USB PD 3.1 at 28V at 5A 140W on the output
To my understanding ( I could be wrong on some of this ) that USB PD 3.0 supports up to 20V at 5A 100W and PPS ( no good link, sorry ) mode and USB PD 3.1 supports up to 48V at 5A 240W and USB EPR and optionally AVS ( previous link describes AVS )
The Framework 180W power adapter supports AVS
USB C cables can support up to
- 5V at 3A - 15W
- 9V at 3A - 27W
- 15V at 3A - 45W
- 20V at 5A - 100W
in addition, cables that support EPR can go up to
- 28V at 5A - 140W
- 36V at 5A - 180W
- 48V at 5A - 240W
When the source ( power bank ) is able to provide more than 100W, it must support EPR
The cable that comes with Framework 180W power adapter is EPR enabled and I also have a Anker EPR enabled cable and a Hama cable that supports up to 100W
Framework cable supports upto 180W
Anker cable supports upto 140W
Hama cable supports upto 100W
When I use the Anker cable or Framework cable, the powerbank fails to negotiate.
When I enable trickle mode ( with EPR still enabled ) on the power bank, it works ( 100W only )
Enabling trickle mode drops the voltage to 20V
When I use the Hama cable ( no EPR support ), the power bank works but only up to 100W ( as expected )
I think whatās happening is that when the power bank detects the cable is EPR enabled, outputting fixed power of 140W, the Framework 16 Embedded Controller ( part of the BIOS ) is trying to negotiate with the power bank using EPR + AVS, but it fails because the power bank ( output only ) doesnāt support AVS, and the FW16 retries after some delay ( I think approximately 1 seconds ) repeatedly until you unplug the power bank
Soā¦
itās either Anker firmware bug, to confirm this, weāll need another powerbank that actually supports PD3.1 with EPR + AVS enabled and outputs 140W/180W/240W to see if that works with FW16
Someone on reddit said
that these powerbanks donāt support AVS on the output
It seems like there some questioning stuff going on there. Iām going to start looking at other brands
Iām not really seeing how Framework could use the fixed power source from this power bank, where would the power go when the FW16 mainboard doesnāt need it and the battery is fully charged? This might explain that click/tick sound the FW16 mainboard makes every second it fails to negotiate.
Iām leaning more towards that the power bank doesnāt support AVS in EPR mode ( power output is fixed instead of variable like PPS ).
What the Anker powerbank should actually do is drop down to PD3.0 upon fail negotiation as it does support PPS or maybe Framework could do this on their side after a number a retries/delays?
What Iāve read here, Iām interpreting it as source and sink know when negotiations fail so they could try again but at a lower version?
Practical solution to the user? buy a USB C cable that only supports up to 20V at 5A 100W that doesnāt support EPR
I think EPR cables themselves are physically tagged somewhere to indicate to the source ( power bank ) and sink ( device like laptop, phone, etc ) to say the cable supports EPR, hence why FW16 is trying to negotiate ( as expected ) with EPR + AVS when the FW16 receiving more than 100W
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Hello,
When I try to charge my framework 16 laptop using the anker 737 power bank, it doesnt work. A message pops up on the power bank screen saying low voltage warning, and the charger seems to keep stopping and starting charging. The orange LED charging indicator turns on and off every few seconds and the wattage reading on the power bank goes from 3w to 0.1w and repeats. I have tried different usb c expansion cards in different slots on the chasis. Ive tried the official usb c to c cable and my own 240w usb c cable. Charging using the official power brick works fine, as well as an anker power brick.
Anker have offered me a 70% refund however i would like to try and get it working before looking into getting a different powerbank.
I have all the latest driver updates including the ones from the driver pack.
(the OS is windows 11 pro even though I doubt that matters)
Thanks in advance!
Alex
The power bank seems to support 140w over pd 3.1, and the framework laptop supports 240w over pd 3.1 so it should work right?
power bank description:
email from framework regarding their charger:
Thatās my understanding.