Saturday, November 17, 2018

Dell Latitude e7470 plugged in not charging

My work laptop began not recognizing its charger cable. I tried a bunch of alternative chargers and mostly it didn't recognize any of them although interestingly there was one it would charge from for a while before it stopped charging from that one. I had some fear that perhaps the laptop was damaging each charger I tried it with, but I have been too impatient to systematically rule that out. Somewhat disorganized testing seems to have shown that the chargers are okay. A whole lot of research has revealed that the charger identification is done through the comically tiny center pin of the charger plug, and interestingly the charge power delivered through contacts the inside and outside of the outer ring. I learned that the communication on the center wire is a protocol called "one wire" which seems like a particularly sketchy system. It talks to a memory chip of all things in the charger, and this chip is called "The Dallas Chip".

Here is the final evolution of my Google searches for this issue. This one produces the best links: https://www.google.com/search?q=dell+latitude+e7470+plugged+in+not+charging

Here's the basic debugging chain presented as a funny video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjB48jGjUVg

The debugging chain offered some hope in that the problem could be in the plug in the laptop, or the cable between the plug and the motherboard. So I got a cable and installed it but sadly this didn't fix the issue.

Here is the cable on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Eathtek-Replacement-Latitude-E7270-DC30100VI00/dp/B07HK61LDW/

I accidently lost a lot of my research trail when my browser crashed, but here are a few more links:

This is the mother of all google hits for this problem. It describes the cause of the problem and actually shows a person debugging the issue finding the Dallas Chip in a charger. It also has a link for stand-alone external battery chargers for Dell batteries, which is pretty much my only hope since the problem seems to be on the motherboard rather than the charger so I have to find a way to add charge to the battery for the moments between when I enter and exit the laptop from hibernation mode:
https://www.laptop-junction.com/toast/content/inside-dell-ac-power-adapter-mystery-revealed