Battery Test - Test Your Batteries Life

[Puck2099]

Hi,

Here you have the application in which I've been working for this week

What is Battery Test?
It's an utility used to test battery life and other related variables in an objective and accurate way, so you can do compare different battery brands or their electrical properties.

How must I install it?
Unzip the files anywhere in your SD card. After that, you will be able to launch the app from the 'games' menu.

How to use it
This program's objective is to test battery life in an accurate way. You should use some recently charged batteries. Launch this app and wait until batteries are depleted. After the GP2X hangs up (you can leave it overnight and check the results by morning), look for the file "stats.txt" that has been generated, and there you can see the results.

When you execute the program, you'll see a menu from which you can select the speed (from 120 to 300 Mhz) and writing rate (time delay between updates to the file "stats.txt" in the SD card). A shorter the time period means more accurate measures. However, when the program detects that less than a 10% of battery is remaining, it will change writing rate to 5 minutes (thanks Uncanny for the idea).

During the execution, a fire effect demo will be shown (code thanks to Joanvr) so you can check that the application is still running, and at the same time, processor speed, frames per second, elapsed time, and battery charge remaining will be displayed at the bottom part of the screen, both numerically and graphically.

The file stats.txt contains the following information: "current charge" is the actual charge when last measured, and "initial internal charge" and "current internal charge" refer to the exact measurement contained in the internal registers when the test started and after the last measurement, respectively.

Where can I download it?
You can download it here.

Regards

 

[Megagun]

<Tom Hanks>FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRE!!!!</Tom Hanks>

Ontopic: Nice. Finally a way to measure battery life RELIABLY!

...man gp32wip is SLOW. 5 KB/s on a 4mbit connection.
In fact, I can't even download it because it just cuts off the download partway through. And no, not my connection being flaky I think.

 

[mrsnature]

i guess its probably best to use a blank card for this in case the batteries die when writing to it and messing up the filesystem?

 

[PokeParadox]

I would imagine it could only potentially mess up the currently written file. It's not so much difference to when you do the CPU speed test and it crashes...

Any case just run your SD through your disk checking tool if you have problems.

 

[Godmil]

oh this sounds really cool. Maybe we could have some kinda wiki table where people can test different types of batteries at diff speeds to see which are best

 

[XaMMaX90]

GREAT!!!

 

[Puck2099]

i guess its probably best to use a blank card for this in case the batteries die when writing to it and messing up the filesystem?

Well, it takes less than a second when writing the file and it does a writing each 5 minutes when batteries are near empty so there is 1 possibility between 300 in which batteries die when writing...

Anyway, it will only corrupt the result file, not your filesystem :rolleyes:

oh this sounds really cool. Maybe we could have some kinda wiki table where people can test different types of batteries at diff speeds to see which are best

Yes, people on GP32Spain think the same, maybe we could merge both tables in the wiki

 

[XaMMaX90]

This stuff is really need for me =) I will go in the shop and test the battaries! Puck2099, you are really good coder... stop no you are really GREAT coder =)

 

[sam fisher]

This stuff is really need for me =) I will go in the shop and test the battaries! Puck2099, you are really good coder... stop no you are really GREAT coder =)

Not unless they let you use batteries for 4+ hours...

 

[jimmyslam]

I just updated the Spanish Wiki, u can copy the code and paste it for a quick process. Or just fill the tables, it is easy!

WIKI UPDATED:

Click Here and post your results!


Cheers

 

[Rivroner]

Thank you very much Puck

 

[wrecK]

I also did some battery related stuff a while ago.
Never bothered to post it on any of the forums, so might as well dump it all here.

My goal was to get a more accurate battery meter, so i wrote a small program to write the batt. level to a file every 5 minutes.

As you can see in the graph, the values all roughly follow the same curve (3 different batteries used), but in the large flat middle part, a small change in /dev/batt means a huge change in remaining time.

While a really accurate level meter isn't possible, it does look like you can get something a bit more usefull than the hi/mid/lo the default menu has.

I haven't bothered doing anything with this data yet, mostly because there are far more fun things to do with a gp2x than this

All the tests were made with the gp2x running DrMD playing megadrive/genesis games untill it freezed.


batteries used:

(best first)
ansmann digital 2700
gp 2700
uniross 2100

the ansmann 2700's were new, so they'll probably last even longer now (nimh's reach full capacity after a few charge/recharge cycles)

you can find all the stuff here

bat.c is the program that reads /dev/batt (you have to compile it to "bat" yourself)
bat.gpu is the shell script that runs it in the background every 5 minutes.
rest of the files are the spreadsheets used to generate the graphs (gnumeric is the original, other are converted and dont show all the graphs)

Hope this is usefull for anyone, maybe i'll return to it once i've finished with all the fun stuff

 

[mdinire]

With a pair of "Power-Plus 2600" I got with a charger on eBay..

STATISTICS:
Clock Speed: 200 Mhz
Running Time: 3:19:18
Average FPS: 81.59

Current charge: 10%
Initial internal charge: 878
Current internal charge: 675

..feel free to add this anywhere you want B)

 

[cowai]

Awsome app! One thing though. When I run at 200mhz the battery meter is at 100%, but when I underclock to lets say 120mhz, the battery says 74%. Why is that? Is it a bug?

 

[Cervante]

Ok I dont understand the website, its in spanish.

Battery:CTA 2700mAH

STATISTICS:
Clock Speed: 200 Mhz
Running Time: 3:45:00
Average FPS: 81.31

Current charge: 0%
Initial internal charge: 910
Current internal charge: 656

 

[Vimacs]

As you can see in the graph, the values all roughly follow the same curve (3 different batteries used), but in the large flat middle part, a small change in /dev/batt means a huge change in remaining time.

While a really accurate level meter isn't possible, it does look like you can get something a bit more usefull than the hi/mid/lo the default menu has.

I haven't bothered doing anything with this data yet, mostly because there are far more fun things to do with a gp2x than this

Nica work! Maybe you should forward your graphs to gph, a more accurate battery meter would be nice, the current battery meter is totaly inacurate for me.

 

[Redeeman]

This stuff is really need for me =) I will go in the shop and test the battaries! Puck2099, you are really good coder... stop no you are really GREAT coder =)

Not unless they let you use batteries for 4+ hours...

usually shops does not bother what one does to batteries one bought.....

 

[Eso Rimmer]

Charger quality is very important too. Maybe even more important than bateries, I think.

 

[Shikaku]

Charger quality is very important too. Maybe even more important than bateries, I think.

I'd say they're equally important.

A quality charger is a charger that does not charge "fast" (takes more than 5+ hours) and also has an algorithm that can detect when it is full, like when the resistance gets to a certain point, and then goes to a trickle charge and because of high resistance it will stay near 100% until you remove them.

A quality battery is a battery that after the initial use of 2-5 charge/use keeps its charge rating for a long time and keeps its voltage/amp output the same as best as possible, not only for each charge but also throughout every charge cycle.

It's basically like a keyboard: unless you want a specalized one for specific specifications, nobody cares, as long as it works and works for a long time. So nobody will really care how long the batteries last...

 

[hackgrid]

Nice, really great app
I love the flames ^^