Thanks to a member of the Discord/SimpleChat community, and their keen eye, we scooped up two TouchPad Gos for a reasonable price -- once split between the two of us. Of course, they arrived dead, so after a few days on his chargers, he asked me to take a swing at bringing them back to life.
I gathered some tips from the chat group, but wanted to document my solution here, in case there are any more of these rare cuties out there.
The Go's design lends itself to repairs much more so than the full-size TouchPad. A pop-off back, and a removable battery just seems so much more civilized (an assertion the EU seems to agree with!) But the same A6 chip graces the Go, and its weird and trouble-prone low-voltage charging logic remain confusing, even on the little guy. This solution, I believe bypasses some part of that logic and more quickly passes the "pulsing home button" stage that normally takes 4-10 days.
Thankfully, the battery helpfully labels the connections, so all it took was stripping a USB cable and attaching the red and black wires to the appropriate connection points. I soldered on a stronger leg to each wire so they'd be held in place by friction in the connector, then connected the other end to a low amp USB charger.
Charging this way appeared to do nothing at first (no pulsing home button). After a couple hours at 1 amp, I pressed and held the power button and got the "?" battery icon. Switching to normal charging at that point resulted in the pulsing home button, so I went back to direct wiring, this time with 2 amps and left it over night. The next day, I tried the power button and got the red battery icon, followed by the "Plug Me In" icon -- I obliged, removing the direct wiring, and plugged in the OEM USB cable to the OEM barrel charger. Not 30 minutes after that, the Go turned on!
I repeated this procedure on the second Go, and had the same results. Of course, YMMV, but both appeared to be complete bricks when they arrived, both came to life within 24 hours of these steps!
