Apple Classroom iPads constantly "chiming" during charging

[russeller]

We have a cart of iPad Air 2's (64GB) running Apple Classroom. They are at iOS 11.2.1. When leaving them plugged into power in the cart they are constantly (sometimes a few seconds apart, sometimes they'll stop for awhile) making that chime sound like when you plug an iPad into power.

It's like the iPad is constantly crashing and reloading the springboard, but they are all logged out of the users and sitting at the Classroom login window.

I haven't plugged them into AC2.5 to watch the console yet, but we can confirm it only happens when Apple Classroom has been configured on the iPads. If the iPads are not running Classroom they don't constantly chime.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Thanks.

[echalupka]

Is the cart using official Apple Lightning to USB Cables? We were seeing an issue in one of our carts as well once we updated to 11.2 that was resolved by switching the cables out.

[russeller]

@echalupka Yes, we are using the lightning cables that came in the box with the iPads. Thanks for the suggestion. We only have the Apple Classroom program rolled out to a couple classrooms so we dont have a ton of teachers ripping their hair out yet.

[dogden]

Although not yet using Apple Classroom, we've noticed a similar issue for the past few months on a handful of devices. We are using Logitech rugged combo cases and for some reason some iPads were not charging properly with some beeping occasionally when connected to the USB cable. I've gone back and fourth between Apple and Logitech and the finger pointing has finally stopped. Apple is releasing an update that should address the issue very soon.

Am Apple rep emailed me today, "Also, in regards to the issues you have had with Logitech keyboard cases, iOS beta 11.2.5 was released and has fixes for the charging issues we have discussed. Would you be open to installing that beta iOS on a couple iPads that were not charging and verify that the beta fixes the issue?"

Hope that helps...

[jdye]

Is this one of the famed Ergotron carts? (Also, hi there! We used to work together.)

It sounds pretty strange that the problem would be limited to a single cart of iPads in particular. Have you verified that this doesn't happen when the same iPads are in a different cart? or can you reproduce this on other sets of hardware too?

[strumpfm]

I did run into this problem once with a ten port USB charger. The USB charger would fail if all ten iPads were trying to charge at the same time. The power would just cycle on and off. What we found was we could charge 6 or 7 at a time, and once they were mostly charged I could plug in the rest. This was not noticed until all the iPads were getting used and needed to be charged.

[galionschools]

@dogden That's good news. I'm considering this case for our next round of iPad deployments in our HS. I was just about to purchase ten but after seeing the two posts in the Logitech Community about charging issues I held back. After speaking to our Apple SE here in Ohio I decided to try two to see how it goes. Thanks for the info.