Psp Don't Recognize any battery, power on via AC only

DarthMotzkus · Jul 31, 2022

Hi there.
I need help to figure out what is the problem with my PSP 3001e unit.
I wrote all the possible worth information to describe everything, so it's a bit long, i really appreciate any help.

The problem is:
With the both batteries i own, good or bad replicas (which are perfectly funcional) my psp won't turn on, even with 100% charged batteries. But if i remove it, and connect the AC original power cord it turns on and works normally.
If i connect the battery while powered on with the ac power adapter, and remove the cable ,the console turns off 2 seconds after or sometimes instantly.

BUT, if i play/leave it powered on for like 20min or so (never less), i can power off, remove the ac adapter, put the battery, and voila! Works untill depletes, after 4/5hs, even more if i let the brightness and sound low.

Another curious thing i noticed, after this "warm up", and after insert the battery pack, and start playing a bit, if i plug in the ac power before the battery pack requires charge (when it start to blink the green led light), the battery icon on xmb starts to flicker like it's trying to charge and gone, reappear, start charging, and gone again and that keeps repeating, untill it turns off the console.

I bought the unit second handed, it's a pretty well conserved console, with travel bag and all. The previous owner uses it with a rubber protection, sadly with no screen protector, so it have some hard scratches on it. I've only opened it to swap the faceplate to a brand new one to get rid of those scratches, internally it's perfect well conserved too.

It's no problem at all play a bit with the ac power cord connected, save after half hour, turns off and insert the battery to play normally, but sometimes it turns off suddenly when connected on power only.
I don't know if i've accidentally move the power cord and it lose contact or something when i play, but it's really annoying 'cause i don't have the freedom to play without the ac power cable hanging, and these suddenly powers off get me very pissed because you don't spect it, and i really hate lose progress.

For the record. When i bought it, the console was working normally.
Then i noticed that when i let it powered off for days, it doesn't turns on without the power ac connected, and i started to think the problem was the battery unit.
I bought a new one from a brand, and leave the another, which seems to be a Chinese non-branded cheap replica, and the new one is more heavy and well constructed, and even takes more to depletes.
Turns out even with the new one, after days powered off, the problem repeats.
And now it's like as i said on the begin of this post. Doesn't turn on with the battery inserted at all.

Any information and help will be much appreciated.
Thanks for reading.

Nikokaro · Jul 31, 2022

DarthMotzkus said:
....Turns out even with the new one, after days powered off, the problem repeats....

First, if you are not going to use it for many days, I recommend that you always store it with the battery charged, or better yet, store it without the battery inserted, as I have always done. My PSP + battery are 12 years old and using this method they are still almost perfect.

Regarding your problem, I have no idea. It would seem that the batteries do not have sufficient voltage, even if only slightly....

AncientBoi · Jul 31, 2022

I tend to clean my battery connection area, every now an then. see if that helps.

And as far as the outer part, I clean it before, and after play.

But I really shouldn't clean the screen too much [scratches that might ensue] I need to buy screen protectors.

PSP 3001

FAST6191 · Aug 1, 2022

That is a curious failure mode. With the above in many ways we can eliminate the batteries themselves being dead internally as the cause.

The PSP is also annoying by virtue of its batteries having onboard chips that are variously used to do things (see the whole debug/repair mode being made from EEPROM number, or lack thereof, on the battery)

In general electronics not turning on with battery in would usually be the sign of a dead battery (or cell within) sucking in too much power and not leaving enough to turn the machine on (startup current being more than normal use a lot of the time, especially if it goes full brightness and spins up the UMD). Dead cells within* or batteries in general would not make a normal play time though. At the same time dead cell seeing something last for a few seconds after loss of external power is the classic tell/test. It could also go one further and if the battery is in deep discharge or some aspect that might benefit from a fairly intense power draw for recovery purposes but this behaviour being across theoretically working batteries is trickier.

Said spikes on power gobbling might also be the reason for unexplained power downs (in UK domestic electronics this would fall under the idea of diversity), though slight failure in connection that the battery would normally be there to smooth out would be the sensible money. Main way to test would be to see if you can induce such a failure but getting to the relevant point in the game, presumably also with max brightness, max volume, UMD going full blast, wifi and whatever else to tip it over, PSP on the desk with nicely fixed and supported power adapter and have it repeat that behaviour -- what points gobble the most power in games can be tricky (I once did some tests for a GBA flash cart and noticed it was actually a fairly static and boring menu that did more power compared to a game) but you can probably make it repeatable for the purposes of a test.

*for the unaware. Most batteries are made up of cells that might have say 1.5V each in them. Said cells are put in series such as to make greater voltages that are actually useful to electronics (5V, 3.3V, 12V...). Many times just one of those cells (usually the leader in the line) will die/appear to work but hold minimal charge and leave the others to pick up the slack, which they can do for a few minutes but as soon as that little bit is exhausted or the rest of the cells drop that little bit (little bit x several - one whole cell = battery out of charge according to the simplistic voltage measurements employed by devices). See also replacing individual cells (usually 18650) in tool batteries, laptop batteries and such like.

A break in period after which the battery works being that long in general electronics (say I am fixing a screen or hifi or something) would speak more to dodgy capacitors (unlikely in a PSP, especially as it is not going to be doing mains smoothing through cheap electrolytic capacitors that was the usual capacitor plague, though we are approaching the time since manufacture when such things will rear their heads and it is not always the cylindrical electrolytics spilling their guts/going puffy and have seen a few more solid state caps have nasty ESR values) or some kind of heat induced connection being made.

We are also back to the internal chips on the battery thing. Having the PSP check to see if valid battery (was a popular thing, especially around the time -- had a few laptops do this as well) might see it not bother after 20 minutes and at that point just roll with it could be a thing. When you say turn off do you mean turn off or just go into sleep/hibernate mode?

I am not sure what the XMB icon behaviour means in this case (and have no special or particular knowledge at all on the behaviours of XMB to make any guess), though certainly a diagnostically relevant thing.

Dying battery or cheapo replacement sending a spike into the guts of the thing could be something. Not necessarily what I would go for though.

At this point then clean battery contacts inside and on batteries for the superficial test/action to do just because. Beyond that we are probably going to have to get into the weeds of internal electronics. Reflow any relevant connectors (heat expanding things and making a connection is less of a thing than heat breaking a connection but still a thing). After that then it is time to start playing with voltage measurements, possibly including busting out the oscilloscope. Without schematics (never seen people reference them but also could have missed such a thing) or a working reference sample to compare against this gets to be quite tedious (all to possibly find some custom Sony chip the only source for is other PSPs is to blame).
If somehow you have access to another PSP then seeing what those batteries do in that might be useful -- cheapo replacement is cheapo replacement, anything new probably sat in a packet for 10+ years at this point, anything sourced from something good for parts only is probably not much better.

DarthMotzkus · Aug 1, 2022

FAST6191 said:
That is a curious failure mode. With the above in many ways we can eliminate the batteries themselves being dead internally as the cause.

The PSP is also annoying by virtue of its batteries having onboard chips that are variously used to do things (see the whole debug/repair mode being made from EEPROM number, or lack thereof, on the battery)

In general electronics not turning on with battery in would usually be the sign of a dead battery (or cell within) sucking in too much power and not leaving enough to turn the machine on (startup current being more than normal use a lot of the time, especially if it goes full brightness and spins up the UMD). Dead cells within* or batteries in general would not make a normal play time though. At the same time dead cell seeing something last for a few seconds after loss of external power is the classic tell/test. It could also go one further and if the battery is in deep discharge or some aspect that might benefit from a fairly intense power draw for recovery purposes but this behaviour being across theoretically working batteries is trickier.

Said spikes on power gobbling might also be the reason for unexplained power downs (in UK domestic electronics this would fall under the idea of diversity), though slight failure in connection that the battery would normally be there to smooth out would be the sensible money. Main way to test would be to see if you can induce such a failure but getting to the relevant point in the game, presumably also with max brightness, max volume, UMD going full blast, wifi and whatever else to tip it over, PSP on the desk with nicely fixed and supported power adapter and have it repeat that behaviour -- what points gobble the most power in games can be tricky (I once did some tests for a GBA flash cart and noticed it was actually a fairly static and boring menu that did more power compared to a game) but you can probably make it repeatable for the purposes of a test.

*for the unaware. Most batteries are made up of cells that might have say 1.5V each in them. Said cells are put in series such as to make greater voltages that are actually useful to electronics (5V, 3.3V, 12V...). Many times just one of those cells (usually the leader in the line) will die/appear to work but hold minimal charge and leave the others to pick up the slack, which they can do for a few minutes but as soon as that little bit is exhausted or the rest of the cells drop that little bit (little bit x several - one whole cell = battery out of charge according to the simplistic voltage measurements employed by devices). See also replacing individual cells (usually 18650) in tool batteries, laptop batteries and such like.

A break in period after which the battery works being that long in general electronics (say I am fixing a screen or hifi or something) would speak more to dodgy capacitors (unlikely in a PSP, especially as it is not going to be doing mains smoothing through cheap electrolytic capacitors that was the usual capacitor plague, though we are approaching the time since manufacture when such things will rear their heads and it is not always the cylindrical electrolytics spilling their guts/going puffy and have seen a few more solid state caps have nasty ESR values) or some kind of heat induced connection being made.

We are also back to the internal chips on the battery thing. Having the PSP check to see if valid battery (was a popular thing, especially around the time -- had a few laptops do this as well) might see it not bother after 20 minutes and at that point just roll with it could be a thing. When you say turn off do you mean turn off or just go into sleep/hibernate mode?

I am not sure what the XMB icon behaviour means in this case (and have no special or particular knowledge at all on the behaviours of XMB to make any guess), though certainly a diagnostically relevant thing.

Dying battery or cheapo replacement sending a spike into the guts of the thing could be something. Not necessarily what I would go for though.

At this point then clean battery contacts inside and on batteries for the superficial test/action to do just because. Beyond that we are probably going to have to get into the weeds of internal electronics. Reflow any relevant connectors (heat expanding things and making a connection is less of a thing than heat breaking a connection but still a thing). After that then it is time to start playing with voltage measurements, possibly including busting out the oscilloscope. Without schematics (never seen people reference them but also could have missed such a thing) or a working reference sample to compare against this gets to be quite tedious (all to possibly find some custom Sony chip the only source for is other PSPs is to blame).
If somehow you have access to another PSP then seeing what those batteries do in that might be useful -- cheapo replacement is cheapo replacement, anything new probably sat in a packet for 10+ years at this point, anything sourced from something good for parts only is probably not much better.

Oh yeah, very tricky this one.

When i said "turn off" is literally turning off holding the power button.
And another problem is, If i put it in sleep mode with the battery after the "warm up" process, it doesn't wake up, and it no matter if i put it to sleep and wake it up quickly after, no juice. Them i need to do the "warm up" process again.
When i need the sleep mode, i made one myself, mute the volume and hold the screen button to power off it.
The curious thing is the sleep mode works normally when i got the unit. Sad thing.

As it loses date/time too, when i remove the battery to do the "warm up", I believe it could be the part mentioned for a user in the psp subreddit, where i posted this case as well, (), saying he had the same issue and the problem was the farad capacitor in MB that seems drained.
I saw something similar on YouTube too.
I just don't have the soldering skills to swap it for a new one, it's Very tiny solder spots, and i'll probably get my psp MB killed if i try it myself.
Maybe i will leave for any technician more experienced than me in due time. For now i will keep using like this.

But thanks anyway for the lecture, much appreciated.

UnderJinx · Aug 1, 2022

I had a similar problem with my Psp, where the battery didn't connect properly
and i fixed it with a small folded piece of paper on the bottom of the battery
That fixed it for me

Paulo_Suzuki · Oct 6, 2023

DarthMotzkus said:
Hi there.
I need help to figure out what is the problem with my PSP 3001e unit.
I wrote all the possible worth information to describe everything, so it's a bit long, i really appreciate any help.

The problem is:
With the both batteries i own, good or bad replicas (which are perfectly funcional) my psp won't turn on, even with 100% charged batteries. But if i remove it, and connect the AC original power cord it turns on and works normally.
If i connect the battery while powered on with the ac power adapter, and remove the cable ,the console turns off 2 seconds after or sometimes instantly.

BUT, if i play/leave it powered on for like 20min or so (never less), i can power off, remove the ac adapter, put the battery, and voila! Works untill depletes, after 4/5hs, even more if i let the brightness and sound low.

Another curious thing i noticed, after this "warm up", and after insert the battery pack, and start playing a bit, if i plug in the ac power before the battery pack requires charge (when it start to blink the green led light), the battery icon on xmb starts to flicker like it's trying to charge and gone, reappear, start charging, and gone again and that keeps repeating, untill it turns off the console.

I bought the unit second handed, it's a pretty well conserved console, with travel bag and all. The previous owner uses it with a rubber protection, sadly with no screen protector, so it have some hard scratches on it. I've only opened it to swap the faceplate to a brand new one to get rid of those scratches, internally it's perfect well conserved too.

It's no problem at all play a bit with the ac power cord connected, save after half hour, turns off and insert the battery to play normally, but sometimes it turns off suddenly when connected on power only.
I don't know if i've accidentally move the power cord and it lose contact or something when i play, but it's really annoying 'cause i don't have the freedom to play without the ac power cable hanging, and these suddenly powers off get me very pissed because you don't spect it, and i really hate lose progress.

For the record. When i bought it, the console was working normally.
Then i noticed that when i let it powered off for days, it doesn't turns on without the power ac connected, and i started to think the problem was the battery unit.
I bought a new one from a brand, and leave the another, which seems to be a Chinese non-branded cheap replica, and the new one is more heavy and well constructed, and even takes more to depletes.
Turns out even with the new one, after days powered off, the problem repeats.
And now it's like as i said on the begin of this post. Doesn't turn on with the battery inserted at all.

Any information and help will be much appreciated.
Thanks for reading.

Replace the capacitor that leaks on the board, it can be with a 1.5v or 3.3v battery, ideally 3.3v, for me it worked with 1.5v.

Psp Don't Recognize any battery, power on via AC only

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