Battery drain post Hotfix 5

[jabz]

Ever since I've loaded hotfix5 my battery drains overnight. 2 Days ago I had fully charged and played some games before going to bed it was showing 80%, I slid the power button to put into sleep mode and in the morning I tried to power up wouldn't turn on. I connected the power supply and powered up it showed battery at 0% and charging.


Yesterday I put it on charge, while it was charging I played some games, then before going bed, removed the power adapter, battery was showing 20%, I slid the power button to put into sleep mode and in the morning I tried to power up wouldn't turn on, connected power adapter booted up and battery was showing at 0%.


Didn't have this issue post Hotfix5.. Do I need to change some options/settings somewhere? Had a look at the XFCE power options, and the sleep mode slider is greyed out. I usually play games from Minimenu and then slide the power button to put into sleep.

 

[Nintendo]

Thanks for the advice Alerino, I tend to find my battery goes from 20% to 0% in a matter of seconds when I put it in sleep mode.

 

[vadsamoht]

my suggestion: leave the battery out for 30 minutes

That would be a potential solution only if this was not a software related problem.


There were some changes to the power management in HF5, but they should not impact the battery drain time. Low power mode should last at leasy a day, and if off much longer than that, though there have been similar issues reported in the past.

Thanks for the advice Alerino, I tend to find my battery goes from 20% to 0% in a matter of seconds when I put it in sleep mode.

Seriously?

 

[Nintendo]

Yes, but when not using my Panda I shutdown all the time now, so I never have problems.

 

[Elanzer]

The solution is turning the Pandora off completely, the sleep mode has never worked very well for conserving battery, I've found it just doubles the battery life (10hours -> 20 hours), and should only be used when you're not going to use it for a couple hours at max.


Then again I'm still a bit confused, my Pandora has been draining the battery when I have it turned off sitting in my bag, after about a week it'll drop from a full charge to about 10%.

 

[Nintendo]

Yeah, same here. It's a complete mystery to me, because 10% is too much.

 

[jabz]

Right so I left the battery out for at least an hour, then I put it on charge, didn't play an games this time, left it in low power mode charging. Before bed it was at 100% charged, I removed the power and slid the power switch to the right it went into low power mode. This morning I checked and the battery is reporting 77%, thats a 22% loss overnight!..


What are others doing to achieve only a 2% loss overnight? How can I tell its actually going into a correct low power mode with nothing running? Has Hotfix5 introduced some polling or something?

 

[EvilDragon]

2% in low power mode is certainly NOT possible yet.


2% is what you lose when the Pandora is switched off per night.


The low power mode simply switches off WiFi, the display and clocks the system down, it won't last longer than 30 hours when the unit is 100% charged.


Low Power is NOT yet a suspend mode!

 

[jabz]

Ha Evildragon beat me to it by a few mins, cause I found this post to suggest currently this is the state of play.. Thanks :


Is Suspend mode coming in the next hotfix? Is there also a Hibernate option where the Hiber file can reside on the SDcard?

 

[Nintendo]

Is suspend better than sleep mode?

 

[vadsamoht]

Is suspend better than sleep mode?

It will be if/when it is implemented fully.

 

[Nintendo]

kk, thanks mate. Can't wait!

 

[WizardStan]

Is suspend better than sleep mode?

Suspend mode keeps memory alive but basically turns off everything else so that restarting requires little more than starting the CPU back up and pointing it at the stuff already in memory: takes about a second to both suspend and restore.


Sleep mode takes the contents of memory, dumps it to disk, and turns the entire thing off. When next you restart, the kernel does a little booting, looks for this memory dump and reloads it, allowing it to continue where it left off: this can take several seconds, minutes perhaps, to copy the contents of memory to disk and back.


The benefits are that suspend can be entered and exited quickly, but sleep is a more complete shutdown that will save far more battery life and could theoretically even survive a complete battery failure.


Hopefully these will come at some time, but they're very hard to do: you can't just shut off power without making sure the hardware attached to that power is shut down properly and can be restored back to its exact state.

 

[peca]

2% in low power mode is certainly NOT possible yet.


2% is what you lose when the Pandora is switched off per night.


The low power mode simply switches off WiFi, the display and clocks the system down, it won't last longer than 30 hours when the unit is 100% charged.


Low Power is NOT yet a suspend mode!

I have about 10% drain per 8 hours if power off. If I remove fully charged battery for few days, it stay fully charged. I'll do power of and even restart with right shoulder button pressed and then choice "power off" from tiny boot menu - loosing charge anyway...


Should this be some HW problem or SW only?

 

[cosurgi]

hibernation already works on beagleboard, and the source code for that is open. But nobody yet ported this to pandora.





it would only require a swap partition on SDHC card.