Power Problems

[MWeston]

EDIT - I take it back, now it's charging. I'll keep a close eye on it. :blink:

I just want to comment that 10 minutes wasn't a rule. Sometimes it could be 20 minutes, sometimes 30+ minutes. It depends on each individual battery and how long it takes them to pop back up from the fully discharged state to the minimum level the power management chips decides is enough to turn on. You've already seen this now but hopefully this comment is useful to others and still great that it's getting noticed and commented on now.

If you are using the system normally and with the full OS running, this full discharge state should never happen anyway but some users are still learning the ropes on what to do and how to plug the adapter in so it happens.

 

[Pleng]

EDIT - I take it back, now it's charging. I'll keep a close eye on it. :blink:

I just want to comment that 10 minutes wasn't a rule. Sometimes it could be 20 minutes, sometimes 30+ minutes. It depends on each individual battery and how long it takes them to pop back up from the fully discharged state to the minimum level the power management chips decides is enough to turn on. You've already seen this now but hopefully this comment is useful to others and still great that it's getting noticed and commented on now.

If you are using the system normally and with the full OS running, this full discharge state should never happen anyway but some users are still learning the ropes on what to do and how to plug the adapter in so it happens.

M - I have a question. How much 'reserve' does the battery have after shutting down at zero percent? I ask this because I fully switched off my unit last night and it showed 61% power. I switched on this morning and it was at 55% - a drop of 6% in 10 or so hours.

 

[MWeston]

M - I have a question. How much 'reserve' does the battery have after shutting down at zero percent? I ask this because I fully switched off my unit last night and it showed 61% power. I switched on this morning and it was at 55% - a drop of 6% in 10 or so hours.

The reserve is not going to be much if you set it to shut down at 0%. I believe the current setting is 3%.

Your gauge shows a battery life representative of what it is doing at the moment. Booting the board takes a fair bit of current since lots of stuff is running and the gauge will show a lower value as soon as you boot. If you left it for several minutes, it would average out and show a number more like what you saw before you shut down.

 

[WizardStan]

Your gauge shows a battery life representative of what it is doing at the moment. Booting the board takes a fair bit of current since lots of stuff is running and the gauge will show a lower value as soon as you boot. If you left it for several minutes, it would average out and show a number more like what you saw before you shut down.

That would make sense for the time-to-empty, but you would think the actual battery percentage level wouldn't be affected by the usage: it's just a literal measurement of how much power is left in the battery, isn't it? The fuel gage on my car doesn't fluctuate when I hit the gas harder.

 

[MWeston]

That would make sense for the time-to-empty, but you would think the actual battery percentage level wouldn't be affected by the usage: it's just a literal measurement of how much power is left in the battery, isn't it? The fuel gage on my car doesn't fluctuate when I hit the gas harder.

That's a good point. I think I wrote a little quicker than I thought the problem through. I could see it going down one percent during the load time but several percent seems like a lot. I can look into the programming of the gauge and thankfully it is something any customer can update if I come up with something more accurate. It's nice having hundreds and later thousands of people testing this stuff rather than just a handful.

 

[htl2001]

That would make sense for the time-to-empty, but you would think the actual battery percentage level wouldn't be affected by the usage: it's just a literal measurement of how much power is left in the battery, isn't it? The fuel gage on my car doesn't fluctuate when I hit the gas harder.

That's a good point. I think I wrote a little quicker than I thought the problem through. I could see it going down one percent during the load time but several percent seems like a lot. I can look into the programming of the gauge and thankfully it is something any customer can update if I come up with something more accurate. It's nice having hundreds and later thousands of people testing this stuff rather than just a handful.

Actually I have seen battery meters read lower during high-load periods - since the voltage of the battery will go down a little when you are drawing a lot of energy from it. It usually snaps back very quickly though.