Well this got weirder.

Last night nothing I did was getting it to work. Nothing. I took it apart and inspected it. It was clean and dry inside. No visible signs of deformation on the battery.

This morning...same thing. Just a constant red light on. No blinking. No indication of charging. Totally dead when unplugged.

I just plugged it in 1 more time at lunch to see if by some miracle it was suddenly working....and low and behold...it was. It's now charging. Light is flashing. After charging for 1 minute it was working properly when unplugged on battery.

Hell if I know....

The only thing I can even think of is that the battery had run down so low that it somehow couldn't register a voltage that let the circuit board charge it. Then by lunch the room is warmer and voltage goes up a tad and it will suddenly take a charge. That's my only guess.

If the circuit board was faulty or corrupted somehow the problem would not fix itself.

So...hell if I know.

Fun fact I learned...the battery is easily replaceable, at least in the Hotshots (I'm assuming all the models of Hotshots have a similar internal design) The battery is a small drone sized battery with a standard connector. It is not hard wired to the circuit board or glued to the housing. It unplugs and pops right out. So as long as you can find a replacement battery with the same specs/size/connector, it would take you about a minute to swap it out. 3 standard screws in the back of the housing.