Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

I am not sure where the bug is. It seems to me the battery level reported may not be truly representative of actual battery power. 14 hours of standby and 10 minutes of wifi usage should be well beyond what a battery level of 0.3% can support.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

I think I have similar problem. After 43-7 AND installed advpower, I am seeing s red battery icon, <0.5% every morning, despite the fact that the tablet was 97% full when I, me, bun, goes to sleep! I am curious to find out whether this is 43-7 problem, or advancpower problem....
First thing first, I would disable the metaclawler 1st....
________________________
N800/flash boot/5.2008.43-7

bun

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

iirc, i was seeing the 0.3% thing before the latest SSU.

thing is, i suspect advpower is not doing much math on its own, and rather reads it off dbus or other sources.

maybe install battery-status and give it a run under such conditions to see if it gives a similar percentage. iirc, it reads its info off dbus...

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

That was one of the first things I tried. Disabling metacrawler did not have any effect on battery life for me. I also fsck'd both my SD cards on my Linux machine and indeed found filesystem problems on one of them. Battery life still went down as before even after fixing filesystem problems. I do use swap space on the internal card and I have not yet tried disabling that, but based upon my observation, I am doubtful of battery meter report as opposed to real battery drain.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

I looked through advpower code and it seems to me it is getting its data off of dbus. I don't know python, so don't quote me on that. In the past, I have switched back and forth between advpower and included battery meter, and they always agreed on remaining time.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

actually i think someone is on to something with the battery driver....i have had similar issues on my n810 since first diablo flash....i thought i had it fixed with deleting the swap file- but that failed.
however the reason i think it is the battery driver is because after getting the red low battery warning.. and placing back in the recharger.. it takes moments to get the full battery notice....- if the battery were really discharged it would take 1-2 hours to fully recharge...

but what confuses me is that the rapid discharge only happens when connected to my home wifi lan not tethered to my phone connection...

i have tried virtually everything to pinpoint this problem.. deleting all 3d party apps changing to default theme to changing wlan status from never disconnect to disconnect in 5 minutes.. (that seems to stop the rapid discharge)

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

I have another problem which may be related - while listening to music every 10-15 minutes i hear quite a long series of skips like something maxes out the CPU usage. Also on two occasions after waking up the tablet i noticed 100% CPU usage in osso-statusbar-cpu, but i never succeeded to catch which process is doing it :(

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

What a difference a card makes.
One of the first things I installed after flashing my N800 to 5.2008.43-7 was Advanced Power Applet, and used it to verify that I was still getting the terrible battery drain. (as other people got, about 3% per hour) both when booting from SD and from flash.

Based on the idea that it may be the SD card(s) I tried booting to flash in different configs, waiting for it to settle, and then measuring after an hour. This was informal, I didn't have to patience to be methodical, but my results are clear anyway:

16GB A-data Class 6 : 3%/hour
2GB Kingston : 1.8%/hour
16GB Patriot Class 6 : .6%/hour!

So I have swapped 16GB cards from my N800 and my camera (Nikon D40x - which I hope has different power management) and suddenly I have the battery life I had before upgrading to Diablo - which was the same moment I started using that A-data 16GB card, I should have tried this before, but didn't think cheap cards differed.

In the 9 hours since performing the switch and topping it off (which is 94.5% according to adv. power) it has only lost 4.5% - and this is booting from that Patriot card, with a microB and an Xterm open but no wi-fi (to simulate being left in a pocket after use)

This also happed to fix another problem I have been having since then.

So, I have a simple question: Why does a card that isn't being read or written to still use any power? (no swap, metalayer-crawler, etc. were involved in the boot from flash test that still used 3%/hour with the A-data)

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

problem exists on my n810 using the internal flash memory

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

So after reading this thread I decided to test my battery by ignoring the "low battery" warning while browsing the web. When the warning came up, I finished the page I was on and then put the tablet down (wifi still connected and OMM weather still set to update (and of course e-mail set to check for mail). Lo and behold after squealing about 5 times about the low battery I observed silence. So I tap the screen, expecting it to be dead and lo and behold, the battery indicator, which was red and empty the last I saw it, had the full charge icon AND stated that I had 8 days of standby and 6 hours of use.

There is definitely something wrong with how the system is calculating charge.

[update] I'm running the latest diablo off an internal HP 4GB Class 4 SD card.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

Good to hear someone else is seeing the same thing. After low battery warning almost 24 hours back, my N800 is still going. Battery level has been bouncing between 30% and 37%. It drops from 37 to 30 and then climbs back up to 35 or 36.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

Yup, I noticed the same behavior too :(

bun

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

I have an even simpler one : why do cards that worked just fine in a N800 with 0S2007 and OS2008-Chinook suddenly create all these random power-related problems in Diablo, and still do after six months and two updates ?...

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

just ran a test this am
connecting to my home wifi and running nothing other than connection manager and adv-power my battery indicator droppedd 6.8% in 5 minutes!
connection manager showed that my n810 received 1.85MB of data and sent .23MB of data. i have set modest to manually download email and i manually refresh my rss feeds- i don't get it
something is operating in the background while on wifi and it is not running while tethered to my phone.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

Usually once a day right after you connect the download manager is checking for updates... That's at least 30 seconds on 70-100% CPU. There are probably other internet eating beasts on your tablet :)

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

I can't install the advanced-power applet cause it says I don't have python 2.5. WTF?

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

Is this EVERY time you connect to the network? At least 2 times a day I have to go into offline mode. Some days it's like 4-5 times? Are you saying each time I go online this thing checks?

That's not cool. I thought it checked when I asked it to. This will have to stop.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

it has a 24 hour counter. it will check at first available chance after that count comes around.
that interval can be adjusted in gconf btw.

also, i suspect modest may not properly respect having the automatic check disabled:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3953

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

Thanks tso. I don't mind once a day regardless of checking status but if it was each and everytime i thrown on the connection then that would be a problem.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

I charge every night before I go to bed and leave my N810 on 24/7. I've only had one instance of mysterious low battery. I turn off my WiFi router wwhen I power down my system for the evening. With it off I occasionaly heard the the lost network connection sound. One morning the battery was very low. I now disaable networking as part of my bedtime ritual and the low battery in the morning event has never occurred again. My N8110 is my constant companion aaand assistant. I use it frequently for short periods as well as some longer use periods. The battery time estimate seeems to be based on battery consumption rate aat that time. After finishing a along period of use it may say 3 hrs but after a minute of idel it may say 5 or 6 hrs. For my useage patterns I consider battery life good. I don't have swap enabled aand the only timed event I'm aware of adding is a daily alarm to wake me in the morning.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

I charge mine overnight as well. I guess I'm still annoyed that I can hit one YouTube video and there goes the battery. Very annoying. I also go offline any time I travel to prevent the thing from trying to connect to a network. Unfortunately if using MM you have to be online to get the bluetooth connection which then prompts for WIFI access. So I've learned to wait for the connection message before driving off.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

substitute with your file location for /var/tmp....

dpkg -i /var/tmp/advanced-power-0.3.0-3_all.deb ; apt-get -f install

stolen from qwerty12.

bun

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

There's 0.3.2 in Garage btw.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

This time when I got the low battery warning, I switched to Nokia battery applet and also checked battery level reported by battery-status. They all agreed battery was at 0%. Of course, after sitting overnight battery level jumped back to 53%.

bhw, I have tried disabling metacrawler and swap. I have also tried keeping NIT in offline mode unless I was actively using wifi. None of it made any difference to reported battery life.

At this point it is pretty clear to me dbus data on battery level is bogus.If there isn't a bug open about this already, I will open one.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

It appears to base it's battery estimate on usage immeadiately prior to the request for battery status. It seems to be saying if you maintained the same battery useage this is how long it wwould last. With the ARM processors ability to reduce power consumption at idle this method will almost always yield results which are suspect.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

It is not a theoretical issue in my case the N810 shuts down because the battery reports no charge

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

It continues to say 0% even after 15 minutes of absolutely idle time with no apps running at all :) Then after several hours battery jumps from 0% to 50+%. This is not a result of reduced power consumption.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

An older lithium battery will show greater dips in voltage under load than a newer one, and will take longer to "relax" to the true voltage state.

I think it is a very safe assumption that there is a discharge curve somewhere mapping voltage to battery percentage, and that any (even temporary) dips in the voltage would show up as a deceptively low percentage remaining - while not reflecting the true remaining capacity of the battery.

How many people with such unusual battery behavior have a young battery?
How many of these anecdotal reports of "Version A was fine, now Version B is acting up" are backed by reloading Version A and seeing if there is true causation or simply correlation with time (age of battery) being the underlying culprit?
How many of these anecdotal reports of unusual battery behavior are comparing stock like-to-like? I've only had my IT for a couple of weeks, but I did not realize swap was part of the standard config.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

my battery is 13months young I started having issues when it was 11 months young

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

Mine is a maaby 4 month old. I use my N810 every day aand never turn it off. I do charge every day before going to bed. I have no perceivable decress in battery capacity.

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

just nought new oem battery from amazon we shall see

Re: Battery life not good -- problem?
 

new battery delivered- and now fully charged and my n810 is now working absolutely perfect- i will wait until tonite when i have more time to try to drain the battery - but it looks like the new battery worked and solved my issues