My sudden death M8 is returning from Solms without any repair!

[colorflow]

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Just received email reply that my M8, which was dead when I sent it, has been updated and is being shipped back in 'perfect working order' without any repair. Apparently it revived after being powered off for so long during shipment etc. and the problem did not show up at Solms. It happened several times for me - the last time it did not revive after powering off overnight more than 12 hours.

 

This is really scary. I don't want to send camera in again and repeat this process. It can also mean it is caused by my spare battery which just arrived when this started happening. Unfortunately I can no longer tell which is the spare...

 

 

Alan

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[jaapv]

That almost certainly means it is the battery and/or charger. I would prevail on your dealer to lend you a spare one of both to try it out.

Otoh, a more than four day period without battery will have drained the internal battery as well, which from your post I think did not happen before. It may have cured it.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

Interesting Alan, so what we can MAYBE conclude is it needed a deep seated discharge. Actually i don't think anyone of us gave it more than 24 hours. I know I did not.

 

So it seems like it may take days to completely drain the internal battery.

 

 

Okay so maybe that is the fix let's just assume for a second it is. But WHAT is the cause and that really is the part that needs to figured out. i am still in the theory of voltage drop and the firmware does not recover from it

[robertwright]

This was exactly the kind of thing I did not want to go through with when my first M8 died, fortunately I had only had it 24 hours so I exchanged it.

 

I bet it went back to Germany or NJ and by the time it got there it worked.

[colorflow]

That almost certainly means it is the battery and/or charger. I would prevail on your dealer to lend you a spare one of both to try it out.

Otoh, a more than four day period without battery will have drained the internal battery as well, which from your post I think did not happen before. It may have cured it.

 

You are right I did not power off for more than 12 hours and never attempted to discharge internal battery. Perhaps discharging the internal battery causes the firmware to do a total reset to clear its scrambled brain...

 

I am going to keep using my two batteries and charger and see if problem recurs and try to get to the bottem of this...

 

Alan

[pascal_meheut]

My M8 had a strange behavior this morning. After being unused for a few days with an 66% discharged battery, it fired 7 pictures by itself when I wanted one, refused to turn off and so on...

I changed the battery for a fully charged one and everything went fine even if the previous one was not supposed to be empty. So I think like Guy and others. The problem may be here.

[pklein]

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Interesting Alan, so what we can MAYBE conclude is it needed a deep seated discharge. Actually i don't think anyone of us gave it more than 24 hours. I know I did not.

 

So it seems like it may take days to completely drain the internal battery.

 

 

Okay so maybe that is the fix let's just assume for a second it is. But WHAT is the cause and that really is the part that needs to figured out. i am still in the theory of voltage drop and the firmware does not recover from it

 

It certainly does sound like the M8 is vulnerable to low battery voltage scrambling the contents of some memory, or putting the CPU in an unusable state. Once the camera gets in that state, the only way to recover is to completely power down all circuitry before restarting.

 

I do computer and network support. I have many times dealt with a user on the road whose laptop crashed and won't boot up. I have them disconnect the power supply, then remove the battery and wait a minute or two. Works almost every time. Some laptops have a little hole in the case into which you can stick an unbent paper clip, triggering a cold reset. Occasionally we have to open the computer and pull a jumper which disconnects a little battery, resetting a CMOS chip that stores some crucial boot-up values.

 

The M8 has a second internal battery that must be completely discharged before the camera is truly powered down. It sounds like we need some sort of bulletproof cold reset key sequence, or a way to disconnect the backup battery from the camera for a few seconds. Something that would fix the Sudden Death Syndrome without our having to wait several days or send the camera back to Germany.

 

With luck, a cold reset could be programmed in firmware. A method of disconnecting the internal battery would probably require a hardware fix, unless it's already there but only accessible to Solms-trained authorized service technicians.

 

--Peter

[colorflow]

It certainly does sound like the M8 is vulnerable to low battery voltage scrambling the contents of some memory, or putting the CPU in an unusable state. Once the camera gets in that state, the only way to recover is to completely power down all circuitry before restarting.

 

I do computer and network support. I have many times dealt with a user on the road whose laptop crashed and won't boot up. I have them disconnect the power supply, then remove the battery and wait a minute or two. Works almost every time. Some laptops have a little hole in the case into which you can stick an unbent paper clip, triggering a cold reset. Occasionally we have to open the computer and pull a jumper which disconnects a little battery, resetting a CMOS chip that stores some crucial boot-up values.

 

The M8 has a second internal battery that must be completely discharged before the camera is truly powered down. It sounds like we need some sort of bulletproof cold reset key sequence, or a way to disconnect the backup battery from the camera for a few seconds. Something that would fix the Sudden Death Syndrome without our having to wait several days or send the camera back to Germany.

 

With luck, a cold reset could be programmed in firmware. A method of disconnecting the internal battery would probably require a hardware fix, unless it's already there but only accessible to Solms-trained authorized service technicians.

 

--Peter

 

Peter, I am thinking along exactly the same line. Have already emailed Solms with cold reset question. Let's see what they say. Hope I have the email address of the right engineer.

 

Guy, perhaps you can get a faster and more complete response through your channels?

 

 

Alan

[Guest guy_mancuso]

I have suggested this low voltage idea before. There is and hopefully some goods news in this dark cloud. We may avoid sending this off for weeks, if we just let it drain for a couple days and recover that is somewhat of good news at least we can get back up and running after a couple days.

 

I know the half glass , half full thing but still ever the optimist. LOL

 

Now the trick is we need to test this if it happens to someone. Let's all remember this becuase we may have someone try this first before shipping.

 

I agree though some kind of reset would be key at least for now

[Cindy Flood]

I programmed this kind of software and it can be the tiniest flaw in the logic that can trigger this kind of scenario. In the case I mentioned one other time on here, two things had to happen at once to trigger the shutdown in our computer. Our logic was fine every time we stepped through the software because we weren't simulating the dual condition.

I think we are getting very close to figuring out where the software engineers need to look to find this problem. It does seem to be battery related.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

Well we may have to look at similar items ,battery is one of them because we all use the SAME one, SD cards have been different in each case so we maybe able to rule that out. Menu items we set differently so the firmware does react differently some with raw only some with Jpg and raw so not a common theme here and reason i keep thinking battery or voltage is because it is the common thread in every camera that went down

[LJL]

Guy,

As you and I have discussed, this IS an issue that Leica needs to figure out. While the idea of pulling power for a day or more to reset is more attractive than weeks in transit to Solms, only to return with a "clean bill of health", this does not do much when you are shooting an assignment and it dies. Having a back-up is obvious, but this sort of delay suggests that one may need a back-up for the back-up, sort of like the old Hassy days.

 

I am developing a new "habit" now. If after a days shooting the battery is half or less, I am letting it drain overnight before recharging. I realize that is NOT what LiIon batteries are designed to do, but they are also much more susceptible to instant power drops than the NiMH or NiCD batteries, so the lower voltage, or voltage drop theory may have a lot more impact quicker. If Leica can troubleshoot this, a good place to start tinkering is to make the camera circuitry "voltage protected" in some way to prevent the theoried scramble. When that kicks in, a simple warning that the battery voltage is dangerously low would help. From there, the next fix it to get the battery/camera power thing properly synchronized so that we know exactly how much juice is left in the battery. The little meter is nice, but I would rather have a percentage readout over some estimated range....and it must be accurate.

 

Just some additional thoughts.

 

LJ

[fotografr]

I would be much relieved if the shutdown problem does turn out to be in the batteries because corrective action could be immediately implemented by Leica. It would mean there is not some inherent weakness in the electronics of the camera, and that would be very good news. On the other hand, as has been mentioned, we cannot be expected to be out on a shoot and have to tell our clients there will be a four day delay while the dead camera recycles itself.

 

When I sent my camera in this time, after three shutdown failures, I also sent in my extra batteries and asked to have them replaced along with a new camera. I wondered if I was being overly cautious, but now I'm happy I did it.

[Guest guy_mancuso]

Yes totally get the part about the 4 day sit and wait deal but a trip to Solms is worse . Backup , Backup and hell more backup. LOL

[fotografr]

Yes totally get the part about the 4 day sit and wait deal but a trip to Solms is worse . Backup , Backup and hell more backup. LOL

 

I wonder if this is a Leica scheme to get us all to buy more M8 bodies. If so, it is brilliant.