Massive Battery Drain?

[thingie1234]

I think I have some sort of battery problem.


In the morning, I'll play with my pandora for a few minutes, go have breakfast, then put it in low power mode, unplug it and head to work.


When I get to the office, I do a handful of morning things, and about an hour after getting to the office (including commute, unplugged for maybe an hour and a ten minutes), see about taking a short break (during my bosses smoke break) to play about five minutes of something.


And my battery says %68.


It was %100 when I unplugged it.


This seems to be not right. Is my meter uncalibrated, or is something really wrong with the battery? I've heard that there's lots of improvement to do in power save mode, but that much? I tend to turn it off all the way at that point, so I don't know if it would switch off.


Anyone have any ideas as to what's going on? I can't seem to find anything on the forums.


I have HF4 installed (I understand 5 is not ready for production use - is this still true?)

 

[thingie1234]

I think I have some sort of battery problem.


In the morning, I'll play with my pandora for a few minutes, go have breakfast, then put it in low power mode, unplug it and head to work.


When I get to the office, I do a handful of morning things, and about an hour after getting to the office (including commute, unplugged for maybe an hour and a ten minutes), see about taking a short break (during my bosses smoke break) to play about five minutes of something.


And my battery says %68.


It was %100 when I unplugged it.


This seems to be not right. Is my meter uncalibrated, or is something really wrong with the battery? I've heard that there's lots of improvement to do in power save mode, but that much? I tend to turn it off all the way at that point, so I don't know if it would switch off.


Anyone have any ideas as to what's going on? I can't seem to find anything on the forums.


I have HF4 installed (I understand 5 is not ready for production use - is this still true?)

I didn't turn it off this morning.


Another hour after it said 68%, it now says 65%.


going from 32% in an hour to 3% in an hour (asleep) seems likely to be some sort of battery gauge issue, rather than a power issue.


Am I correct in thinking that?

 

[MWeston]

My battery readings used to be totally accurate and then I installed some of these HF5 betas and now it does strange stuff like this too. I doubt the battery is actually changing that fast. Something seems screwy in the code.

 

[EvilDragon]

My battery readings used to be totally accurate and then I installed some of these HF5 betas and now it does strange stuff like this too. I doubt the battery is actually changing that fast. Something seems screwy in the code.

Hmm, very interesting. As far as I know nothing has changed there.


Is the battery reading code in the kernel?


Oh, wait - are you reading the battery within MiniMenu?


MiniMenu got a lot of updates, maybe something is wrong there?

 

[MWeston]

It must be reading from the kernel. It does strange things like charging to 100% and then I do a reboot with the charger removed and when it comes back up it says 94%. It never used to do that and I've noticed the readings changing with reboots when there's no way the actual capacity could change that much.


One thing I read on a website about Lithium Ion battery management is that fuel gauges tend to like monitoring full charge/discharge cycles and not these quick little drop, then recharge to full again procedures I have done. Maybe the gauge doesn't know how to handle the capacity assessment if you don't use the battery like a normal person. I don't get to use my Pandora much so maybe it just loses accuracy over time. I can't imagine what would be in HF5 to cause this strangeness. I didn't see anything done there in the change logs.

 

[notaz]

From kernel's point of view there is nowhere to go wrong - it just forwards data directly from gauge/i2c to GUI without any processing, caching or whatever.


The GUI may sometimes not update the value (older minimenu had this problem), but it doesn't look the case here.