I’ve noticed some strange behavior with my FW13 AMD 7840U:
When I connect a charger to the laptop while it’s powered off, the charging LED indicator sometimes turns a bright bluish-white, and no charging occurs, despite the battery being far from full. The measured current at the USB-C port remains around 0A at 20V. After unplugging, the charging indicator stays lit for at least another 7 seconds. Reconnecting the cable afterwards results in normal charging. Similarly, leaving it plugged in and simply turning the laptop on restores the normal charging operation.
I was able to replicate this issue using both the native FW charger and a couple of third-party chargers. This occurred with BIOS versions 3.03 and 3.03b and does not seem to be dependent on a specific USB-C port.
Since I rarely plug in the laptop when it’s turned off, I’m uncertain if this issue was present from the start or developed recently. Furthermore, I don’t know if it’s related to the battery’s charge level; all my tests were conducted with the battery being 30% to 50% charged.
It appears more likely to occur when the laptop has been off and disconnected for a little while; 20 minutes seem to be enough. Unplugging and replugging it within a relatively short period—for example, within 5 minutes after the LED turns off—seems to consistently result in normal charging.
I’m unsure if this is an indicator of a failing component or just another EC/PD bug. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the necessary equipment to diagnose this further. But would be happy to try, if I could.
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I would be really interested to know if anybody else is seeing this behavior. If my FW is an exception, I should, probably, contact the Support?
I might have encountered this before.
I have a 7840U FW that’s not being used. When I learned 3.03b (3.03 BIOS+EC update) was released, I pulled out the 7840U FW to update it. After the update, if I recall correctly, I shut it down and walked away. When I returned later I decided to try charging it with a 30W charger to test the PD negotiation fix. I plugged the charger in without booting the laptop, and the LED illuminated white (not blue) despite I know it’s not fully charged, after charger disconnection the LED did stay on momentarily. After booting into Windows the laptop charged with the 30W charger normally, I haven’t given it too much thought and didn’t use the laptop since.
This is potentially an EC bug, perhaps a bug report to the support could be appropriate. Since the EC is open source, someone like DHowett can also dig into the issue, if they choose.
Mine might be white as well, it’s a little hard to tell for sure. I think it’s the same color as when the battery is full.
I’m just thinking if it’s a bug, rather than a hardware defect, it would’ve been seen by pretty much everyone with the same FW13 AMD model. Most of the times I plug my powered off laptop in, it doesn’t charge on the first try, regardless of the charger or port I use, so I thought others would’ve noticed if it was happening to them too. Except that, I guess, I’m not the only one who doesn’t plug a cord into a powered off (and cooled off) laptop that often…
Anyway, thanks a lot for sharing, @Jason_Username_Taken!
And, @DHowett, if you’re reading this, maybe you could try to reproduce? I’d be happy to collect more info too, but since most of the laptop is off when this happens, I’m not sure how that can be done.
The side LEDs on AMD13 is definitely implemented differently than Intel13, at least when compared to 12th Gen board.
My daily is an 12th Gen Intel FW, LED is orange when charging, white when full. The illumination appears solid visually.
When looking at the AMD13, it is immediately apparent that when displaying white, the LED is either achieving the white color by rapidly cycling through different colors (like color wheel projector), or it is natively showing white but being PWMed at a rather slow frequency, slow enough to be noticed.
Not relevant to the charging issue under question. Just figured to point it out since you brought up LED color 
Hi,
I have noticed my Framework laptop does the same thing. I too am using the AMD R7 7840U CPU.
Usually after not being used or plugged in for a while and when the device is powered off, the charging light will be white indicating a full battery, despite not actually being full. When powered back on or left for about 15 minutes, it will turn orange to indicate charging.
Since making this post, do you have any further information regarding this issue?
Thanks
The behavior seems to have spontaneously fixed itself for me. I did run out of battery at least once in the interim, leading to a BIOS settings reset, so perhaps that had something to do with this. But, there might’ve been some other factors - for example, I booted into a few of my much older NixOS generations, and so the FW was subjected to a bunch of different firmware and kernel version loading. In any case, I’m not experiencing it anymore.
Earlier, I looked at the EC firmware source code, and I’m pretty sure that what I was seeing was the white light the EC turns on when it’s confused about its charging state machine’s current state - which is something it treats as an error. It’s the same color it uses when the battery is full, but the light stays on for a little while when the cable is disconnected (I’m thinking because the state is still the same). It also kind of makes sense that after the light turns off, the state machine is reset, and the next time the charging works. But, since the problem seemingly had gone away, I didn’t keep looking closer.