Battery Drain

[Twiitcher]

It appears Notaz has hit on something interesting, and a possible solution. I turned my Pandy off at 11:15 PM EST last night while wifi was on (and connected) and battery level was at 75%. When I turned it back on this AM at 8:15 AM the battery drain was, lo and behold, a wonderful thing, battery level had gone done only 1%. That's 1% in 9 hours, not 1% per hour as I had been experiencing.


Now the only further testing is to 1) turn off with wifi on and NOT connected, also 2) turn off with wifi off (in case it's the new firmware that caused the change. I'll do these tests to see if further isolation / diagnosis can be determined. As it stands it's a very good thing though as I can turn off my Pandy and not worry about battery drain by just insuring that wifi is on when I power down.


Not sure what train of thought you followed, I'd assume something you saw while tweaking the wifi? Nice find.


Twiitcher


"I had NOTHING to do with it"

 

[doublebeta]

Well, that, but also the old hard drives did not like being suddenly powered down when they were in motion. If you were saving something and just suddenly powered down, the head tries to come to a dead stop and momentum takes over, threatening to scratch your disk like a needle off a turntable. Hardware is better now, obviously, and so is software, but the point I was trying to get across is that you can't just arbitrarily decide you want a feature without recognizing that there may be consequences to that feature, especially when the sole purpose of that feature is to save money and energy where it the side effects may end up costing more than it saves.


Ok, yeah, when I meant "whole thing corrupt" I meant the FAT goes bad. You can of course format and simply continue using the disk, or a clever person could possibly rewrite parts of the FAT, and maybe you can even recover some of it with an fsck, but to the average person many of their files have become lost simply because they dropped the power when they shouldn't have too often.

Oh, yeah, I see your point, I was just curious as to what was going on there - I should have not asked . I totally see what you mean, with turning it off too early - you'd have to be sure your head was off the drive. I have heard horror stories of people losing their disks while their computers were apparently doing nothing, until now I had been sure they were just saying that to avoid trouble .


Oh, and I didn't mean to sound so accusing, and stuff. I have a tendency to do that involuntarily .

It appears Notaz has hit on something interesting, and a possible solution. I turned my Pandy off at 11:15 PM EST last night while wifi was on (and connected) and battery level was at 75%. When I turned it back on this AM at 8:15 AM the battery drain was, lo and behold, a wonderful thing, battery level had gone done only 1%. That's 1% in 9 hours, not 1% per hour as I had been experiencing.


Now the only further testing is to 1) turn off with wifi on and NOT connected, also 2) turn off with wifi off (in case it's the new firmware that caused the change. I'll do these tests to see if further isolation / diagnosis can be determined. As it stands it's a very good thing though as I can turn off my Pandy and not worry about battery drain by just insuring that wifi is on when I power down.


Not sure what train of thought you followed, I'd assume something you saw while tweaking the wifi? Nice find.


Twiitcher


"I had NOTHING to do with it"

That's really weird :\. (play mystery tune).


Really really off topic:

Spoiler

Twiitcher are you part of Team Twiizers?

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Team_Twiizers just a random thought, I really have no other indication of such other than your name. Btw, nice group, those guys - they know that homebrew and piracy are different scenes and that piracy is bad .

 

[WizardStan]

I'll do these tests to see if further isolation / diagnosis can be determined.

Best make sure to perform each test a few times to make sure it wasn't a fluke. You may even discover some root cause accidentally if you do it enough. It does seem really weird that wifi being ON would save power. I'd expect it to be the other way around.

Oh, yeah, I see your point, I was just curious as to what was going on there - I should have not asked

Nah, you should definitely ask for clarification if you aren't sure about something. I'm frequently an idiot but I don't realize it unless it's pointed out to me.

 

[doublebeta]

<snippity>


Nah, you should definitely ask for clarification if you aren't sure about something. I'm frequently an idiot but I don't realize it unless it's pointed out to me.

Hey, you're no idiot! You've done nothing wrong!

 

[Twiitcher]

Best make sure to perform each test a few times to make sure it wasn't a fluke. You may even discover some root cause accidentally if you do it enough. It does seem really weird that wifi being ON would save power. I'd expect it to be the other way around.


As stated, I did re-run the test, it is intermittently using 1% per hour and not. I've been turning off with wifi on consistently (sometimes connected and sometimes not), no correlation between no excessive battery drain and connection status. It might be related to the %age of battery life left, I have yet to see normal battery drain from 100%. I'll continue to test each night and see if I can find some trend or consistency.


Twiitcher

 

[neko]

I had the wifi on before I shut down my pandora yesterday. As it was shutting down, the red light went out. I just turned it back on and the battery is still fully charged.

 

[Mr. Beam]

My theory is that your clock battery has died, and the clock is using main battery power. Or that your clock thinks that, but the clock battey is just fine (which would explain why your clock still keeps time, it's forced to use the clock battery.)

 

[WizardStan]

My theory is that your clock battery has died, and the clock is using main battery power. Or that your clock thinks that, but the clock battey is just fine (which would explain why your clock still keeps time, it's forced to use the clock battery.)

There is no "clock" battery. There is just one battery. The clock is powered by the Pandora's battery. Even so, it should only discharge at about 1 or 2% per day

 

[jonlad1]

I have the exact problem as Twitcher.


My battery drains completely over 2-3 nights whilst turned off.


My clock always reverts back to two hours behind after turning on. If I set the clock, turn off (it seems when the battery runs out) and it goes back to two hours before current time.


Not tried the wifi trick though. Hopefully software can fix this?