My Cycliq Fly6 continued to shut down during rides, even with a new video-rated card, suggesting:
- The fault resides in the camera
- The Samsung card is just fine
Following all the steps recommended by Cycliq Tech Support didn’t improve the situation. It’s just under two years old and thus outside the warranty, so they advised me to buy their new, not-quite-released-yet Fly6, now with Bluetooth / ANT+ / phone app / shiny, but still with a non-replaceable battery.
Seeing as how the Fly6 works as well as it ever did, apart from the minor issue of shutting down both dependably and intermittently, the problem is almost certainly a bad battery. Cycliq does not offer a repair service, nor a battery replacement service; being based in Australia probably contributes to not wanting to get into those businesses. You’re supposed to responsibly recycle the Whole Damn Thing when the battery goes bad. Which, inevitably, it does.
Protip: anything with a non-replaceable battery is a toy, not a tool.
The most recent ride gave some evidence supporting a bad battery. The first shutdown happened after about half an hour and it gave off three battery status beeps (four = full charge, as at the start of the ride) when I restarted it a few minutes later. It shut down again a few minutes later while we were stopped at a traffic signal and gave off one lonely charge beep when I reached back to restart it, indicating a very low battery voltage. The battery voltage (and the number of startup beeps) increased with longer delays between shutdown and restart, but after the first shutdown it’s never very enthusiastic.
Having nothing to lose, let’s see what’s inside:
Don’t do as I did: you should extract the MicroSD card before you dismantle the camera.
Remove the rubber plugs sealing the four case screws:
The case pops open, with a ribbon cable between the LEDs and the main circuit board:
Pull the ribbon cable latch away from the connector before pulling the cable out.
It’s amazing what you find inside a blinky taillight these days:
I’m sure there’s a fancy 32 bit RISC computer in the big chip, along with plenty of flash ROM just below it. The clutter over on the right seems to be the power supply. Yeah, it has a camera in addition to blinky LED goodness, plus USB charging, so eight bits of microcontroller aren’t nearly enough.
There’s supposed to be some nanotech waterproofing protecting everything inside. It sure looks like magic to me and, in any event, solders just like a layer of ordinary air.
Note: the case screws are slightly longer than the PCB retaining screws:
The underside of the PCB has even more teeny parts, along with, mirabile dictu, a battery connector and (most likely) battery charging stuff:
A plastic piece holds the “Rechargeable Li-Ion Battery Pack” in place:
A strip of gooey adhesive holding the mic and speaker wires in place also glues the battery strap to the case, but it will yield to gentle suasion from a razor knife.
Pause to count ’em up:
- Four case screws (longer)
- Three PCB screws
- Two battery screws
It looked a lot like an ordinary 18650 lithium cell to me and, indeed, it is:
More razor knife work removes the outer shrinkwrap. The cell has a protection PCB under the black cardboard cover:
I don’t know what the yellow wire does:
The FS8205A on the left may be an SII S8205 protection IC preset and packaged for a single cell:
After all that, yeah, it’s a dead battery:
The red curve shows the in-circuit charge state after taking it apart, the green curve comes from charging the bare cell in my NiteCore D4 charger. I have no idea what the nominal current drain might be, but a 0.25 Ah capacity is way under those Tenergy cells.
A new cell-with-tabs should arrive next week, whereupon I’ll solder the protection circuit in place, wrap it up, pop it back in the case, and see how it behaves.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
I suppose the yellow wire handles temperature feedback, backed up by the ‘T’ in the silkscreen.
My DeWalt Ni** batteries have a temp feedback circuit; it came into play when one pack hit end of life. Good Charger! Nice Charger! Note to self; find the battery recycle box at Home Depot.
Good catch!
The local Best Buy now has a pushcart labeled “Recycle Here” for electronic stuff. I must sign up for one of the county’s hazmat disposal days to get rid of my fluorescent tube accumulation.
Thanks! Looks like there’s a Best Buy in Medford; I’m getting there fairly often while getting my eyes reworked. Not sure what’s happening with the recycleable electronics; after the Chinese stopped taking the usual gubbage (paper, cans and plastics), the powers that be are busy holding meetings and allowing stuff to be put in landfills. Meanwhile, I’m crushing the steel cans (don’t get aluminum ones) and will try to crush non-usable plastics. Glass and cardboard is still recyclable.
Today’s festivities involved using a YAG laser to open the cloudy membrane behind the (replaced) lens in one eye. Kind of cool, especially comparing the medical laser to the water cooled monster I used at Moto in ’73. Not sure what they used to pump the crystal, but it wasn’t a lot of pulses; seemed like the doctor was playing Doom on my eye.
The recycling shockwave hasn’t hit here yet; I don’t know if they ship the East-coast recycling stream somewhere across the Atlantic for “proper disposal”. Much of our environmental cleanliness comes from exporting our pollution elsewhere, so being forced to keep the waste here may also force us to (re)consider what actually happens to it.
Being the second-person player in a first-person shooter game: erk!
Ah, that was the easy one. My corneas need to be reworked. Be forewarned: Diamond Burr Keratectomy is a thing. (Apparently less nasty than the laser version.) I think of it as buff and polish.
Getting to watch it from the inside: priceless!