Release Hotfix 6 Final released!

[peelie]

fyi setting battery charge enable from 1 to 0 working for me; i.e battery charging to 100percent

 

[FRZ]

I think the battery depletes too fast for me. For example today. I unplugged the OP 7 hours ago and only open mousepad to quickly edit a document for two minutes and then put in low power mode, wifi off, lid close and all. Now the it reads 44% battery. That's way too much battery wasted for 7 seven hours with such limiteded used.

 

[FRZ]

^ In the case of such issues with PNDs, you should try removing the appdata entry for the ones that you're having problems with (remember to back up preferences or files you want to keep that are in the appdata directories, though!). Some others have reported the same with Hotfix 6, and have said that this fixed it for them.


If that fails, checking for an updated PND is the next step to take.

Sacre blue, it work. Deleted appdata for keepnote and now its running again. Thanks.

 

[Prometheus]

Glad to be of assistance. That's always the first stop if a PND misbehaves!

 

[dreamer]

I think I've got it figured out. On advice from TI, I did a complete cycle to recalibrate. A complete cycle apparently requires a full charge, sit at 100% for 2 hours, then a full discharge below 3.0 volts and left for 5 hours. It was the "leave it empty for 5 hours" part I didn't know about. It's taken me the better part of the weekend to get to this point, but preliminary results are very favourable. I'm going to try one more full cycle to 100% and back down and see if it approaches zero this time. The TI tech suggested it may take a few complete cycles for it to really learn where zero is, but if it even comes close this time I'll be happy.

I'm not sure how to get the battery fully discharged. I disabled the 'turn off device' from the battery monitor and left it on 'low-power mode' for about a day now, but it seems to stick around 4%


I can still boot up the system, then get a warning it's below 5%.


Should I just keep it up for another few hours and then fully charge the device again for another round?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Don't know what to tell you, I'm pretty sure that should have worked. Try setting "stop_current" to 0 perhaps?

Does not work either ! The red led stops around 95%, then batterie discharge.

 

[milkshake]

well if worst comes to worst you could install the original firmware (maybe on an sd card) just to charge your batter?

 

[Linux-SWAT]

There's no other way to stop the charge limiter ?

 

[WizardStan]

I don't think this is the charge limiter. It should be switched off by this point, if not by setting enabled to 0 then definitely by setting the limit to 0.


The only thing I can think of is that the percentage is wrong. Here's the situation: the TWL chip is SUPPOSED to stop charging when it reaches a certain threshold automatically. My original one did this, as well other users have reported that theirs did this (albeit usually as a bug report ). Anywho, that is entirely expected behavior. The problem, first, was that not all Pandora's would stop charging as they were supposed to: some slight variance of the boards kept the detected charge rate from dropping below the expected threshold long enough to stop the charging, which resulted in more energy being dumped into the battery than it could safely store, slowly damaging it over time. The second problem was that, even those that did stop charging would not restart again until the battery was quite low, resulting in people waking up in the morning with 70-80% charge remaining; many a bug report was filed. The charge limiter fixes both problems.


Now, on the other hand, there's the bq chip. While the twl charges the battery, the bq keeps track of that charge and reports an estimated maximum and remaining amp hours. If it has miscalculated the maximum (and it's a learning chip, so this value can go up and down over time, depending on usage and the actual abilities of the battery) to be 5% higher than the actual maximum, then it could be that the battery is actually full, the twl is doing the thing it was designed to do and shutting off the charge, just that the bq has an improper measurement of the battery capacity now for some reason. I've been experimenting with how to get the bq chip to quickly recalibrate. I've cycled my battery more times in the last week than I have in the month before, but I think I'm finally onto something


When I've got the details worked out, I'll post a how-to on recalibrating the bq chip. I'm not certain why it would have become uncalibrated in the first place though. It's kinda weird, but since none of it happened before HF6 there's a good chance it has to do with the safety limits.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, we FLASH the bqchip before shipping out the Pandoras with values the MWeston measured.


If we don't flash it, the battery reading it totally uncalibrated.


However, I thought this was a fixed value we're flashing there... does that change somehow?

 

[DaMummy]

its official, my pandora cant hold a charge worth a damn in low power mode. at some point in time, it dies completely. sometime within 24 hours. seems like it just loses voltage and wont power on, as i can get out of low power mode after 5 hours, and still show only less than 5% drop in battery. somewhere down the line, it just dies from wherever it is, even from 90% straight to 0

 

[WizardStan]

However, I thought this was a fixed value we're flashing there... does that change somehow?

The default values were all there, and all looked good. There's no doubt that these were the values that MWeston found to be good: they work fine in nearly every Pandora it would seem, but there's just something still not quite right. Even natural drift doesn't fully explain this. I've forced a recalibration and the bq is now reporting that my Pandora can only store 3500mah. Both of my batteris. That's a far cry from the 4200 that these were designed with. Yet, even with the apparent 15% loss in storage, I'm still getting the same play time as before; I should know, I've had to wait while cycling this thing several times now!


So weird...


edit: DaMummy's issue is something completely different. :/

 

[EvilDragon]

You mentioned you're in contact with someone to solve this issue... are you on some track here or is there something I can try to do to help?


This is an issue that needs to be solved as soon as possible.


We're working on HotFix 7 already and have some stuff for an Alpha 1 release already (just need some time to actually compile everything together), would be neat if we could get some patches for this issue as well.

 

[DaMummy]

sad part is, my pandora can stay powered on with battery draining at regular pace if i just leave it on with lid closed, of course thats until it gets to that magical 17% for me when it likes to initiate the critical battery power down

 

[WizardStan]

I'm pretty sure it's an issue with the sense resistor (a 10mohm resistor between the battery contacts to measure current use) being incorrect. According to the tech at TI, if the resistance is a little bit higher for some reason (a bad resistor or, I dunno, corrosion on the solder pads for example) then it will dectect a lower current flow than actual which will result in exactly the situation I saw. He was a little surprised that I had to enable the IT algorithm manually though. He said it should be enabled on all devices going out to production so they calibrate to exactly this situation: it may be detecting an incorrect current flow, but it doesn't matter because it balances that out by detecting a smaller capacity battery, even though there's nothing wrong with the battery.


I'm not sure if this will become a widespread problem (not likely) but if it does the fix is pretty simple: enable the IT algorithm (I'll write a program to do just that) and then deep cycle the battery.

 

[Darkknight512]

It also depends on the charge cycles the battery has gone into, from my experiences with LiPo batteries for RC use, they kinda start at 80-90% full rated capacity and after about 10 partial charge cycles they can take a full almost 100% charge before slowly declining.


This might be of use, I wrote a presentation on rechargeable batteries for a chemistry class a while ago. This was one of the best resources I have used. http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/


What is the precision of the sense resistor (from the manufacture)? Keeping in mind to check the resistance you need to take the resistor out of the circuit.


What is our cuttoff voltage for the battery? 3.5 Ah might be correct if the Pandora cuts off at around 3.6 volts because 4.2 Ah is rated at something like 3.2 volts cutoff. Using voltage to measure battery capacity is close to linear, but it has curves to the beginning and end of the capacity vs voltage graph.


Also I have noticed that our battery gets quite hot when drawing more then 350 mA, we could be losing quite a bit of capacity due to that, that is something the sense resistor will not see.


I'll charge my Pandora's battery to full, and then take it out and let it sit for about an hour (after a charge the battery voltage will be higher then expected) and check the battery voltage with a DMM, we might be charging the battery up to 90% in the first place instead of the expected 100%.

 

[notaz]

This is an issue that needs to be solved as soon as possible.

Well if you want to revert to pre-HF6 behavior just set [battery_charge] enable to 0 in /etc/pandora/conf/eventmap, that's it. It's pulled into firmware from pandora-libraries.git.

I'm not sure if this will become a widespread problem (not likely) but if it does the fix is pretty simple: enable the IT algorithm (I'll write a program to do just that) and then deep cycle the battery.

What makes you think IT is not already enabled here? Also check Your PM.

 

[WizardStan]

What makes you think IT is not already enabled here? Also check Your PM.

IT Enable register was 0x00


Issuing an ENABLE_IT command flipped it to 1 and everything started working again.


Unless something happened and IT became un-enabled somehow.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Well if you want to revert to pre-HF6 behavior just set [battery_charge] enable to 0 in /etc/pandora/conf/eventmap, that's it.

Doesn't work for me :/. 95% is the max i can reach now.

 

[WizardStan]

Can you try reverting to HF5 temporarily?