Re: N900 battery drain
 

Hmm, that other thread is rather inconclusive as to whether it was really the overclocking that had caused it. I would consider it unlikely albeit not entirely impossible.

BTW, you have not answered my question about the 10 hours you squeezed out of your battery. For a comparison, I took my phone off the charger at 06:38 this morning. It is now 10:04 and the battery level is at 74%. I received one SMS, sent and received a couple of emails, did some online banking for about 10 minutes and read this forum for about 30. That's it.

Re: N900 battery drain
 

That's right. Afraid I just assumed it was overclocking. There was just a suspicion that overclocking may have caused it. There was no solution, either. Also, the error messages differ from mine.

Did find someone with exactly the same error as mine. The issue is also posted in the bug report thread linked from that post. There's a straightforward solution that was provided too - power off, remove battery, turn on. Sadly, doesn't work for me.

About my battery usage. The 10 hour usage was with 3G turned on, roughly 2 hours of SSHing into the phone over WLAN, 1 or 2 SMS received, no phone calls, installing/purging several packages on x-terminal, running powertop/zzztop several times.

Tested again today, and the battery drained to 0% from 91% in 6 hours. It was with 3G on, at least 2 hours of web browsing, about 15~20 mins on modrana with GPS on, couple more hours on the x-terminal setting up packages, an hour with mobilehotspot on.

The phone feels warm to the touch at times, but I don't think it gets alarmingly hot. It's 35C here, so "warm" may well be warmer than I think it is.

Thank you.

Re: N900 battery drain
 

By 3G on you mean 3G data connection active all the time? If yes, your battery life is pretty normal, 3G data is power sucker, even if you don't transmit much. If you need to be online, but doesn't transfer much at the moment (like, you want to be logged in for SIP or mail or anything), switch to 2G. The latter is much, much more power saving when connected but "standby". Of course, if you're actively using device and need high transfers at the moment, switch to 3G by any means (and switch back to 2G after you're done).

Anyway, your powertop output is still bad, and I suspect that something may still be stubborn and call dead module, waking CPU. I would trust powertop output more than zzztop's one (although, no particular reason - is just that powertop output never lied to me in the past). I don't get how results concerning C4 state can be so completeley different - either one of the tools contain serious bugs that manifest in your case (or in all cases, as I don't recall any extensive testing done on zzztop, determining if it's connected to reality) , or I don't know what.

Sorry that can't help more :(

/Estel

/Edit

Just for the record, to avoid creating another OC myth - the BT damage in other thread is really unlikely to have anything to do with overclocking. By the content there, it's just a "flip-coin" assumption.

Re: N900 battery drain
 

What I meant was that the network mode was set to "Dual", which defaulted to 3G. I had the actual data connection active for around 2 hours at most (less than 1/3rd of the total period). For good measure, I have since downloaded the 3G/2G mode applet and have set the network mode to 2G.

About the powertop vs zzztop results, the inconsistencies in the C4 state are quite consistent. They remain so, even after flashing.

This appears on my dmesg, despite attempts to disable the bluetooth modules. Could it point to something?

Re: N900 battery drain
 

Sadly, I lack expertise on that bluetooth integration thing :(

And now for something completely different (and not Spanish Inquisition, too) i I would like to finally determine if your's device current draw is normal or not (which, in extension, will tell us if it's worthwhile to dig that nightmare'ish bluetooth integration topic deeper).

Could you, please, download the attachment (of this post) file to MyDocs, then, execute as root:

...and perform two following tests:

1. Disable cellular, wifi, and all other connections, close all programs etc (just like for powertop test), and execute (as root):

Ignore error after modprobe -r, if bq27x00_battery is not found, and after executing bq27200.sh 20, lock the screen and leave device idle for ~5 minutes. Then, unlock it, stop the process (ctrl+x), and post output here.

2. Do the same test as with #1, but this time, with cellular (although no data connection) and your other usual "standby" things enabled (screen still locked). Also post output here.

Cheers,
/Estel

Re: N900 battery drain
 

Attaching the test results. File bqidle02.txt -> test #1, bqactive02.txt -> test #2.

A word about the battery. The one I used to test is a stock Nokia battery that came with the phone. However, I cannot attest to it's genuineness, since there appear to be identical fake ones (and I bought the phone used). I have 2 more spare batteries bought on Ebay. One of them turned out to be a cheapo 900mAh that doesn't even boot the phone up. Another is slightly better at 1250mAh and works. I have no idea how it compares to the original BL-5J, though.

Re: N900 battery drain
 

That's odd. Here is an extract of mine. It shows the current about a third to a quarter of yours, and I did not even bother disconnecting the wireless services. That is, GSM (2G) and WiFi were on and connected.

Re: N900 battery drain
 

Don't quite know what to make of the rest of the numbers, but the high current (at pretty much the same voltage as yours) certainly sounds bad.

Here's something else that seems odd. I ran powertop for 5 mins, and there was an improvement in the C4 share (was close to 15%). Decided to take it further and ran it for 20 mins, and the numbers are totally messed up, as you can see below.

powertop output (20 mins):

Re: N900 battery drain
 

The tests clearly shows that your CPU doesn't sleep - it matches results of "healthy" device if CPU is keep awake by some loop command. As a side note, it also confirms that powertop output is right, and zzztop completely lies (might be worth mentioning to zzztop maintainer). I think that you can skip any zzztop tests from now on.

Of course, it explains poor battery life (especially in standby). I guess that your active time (if used actively non-stop from charging to completely discharging) is no different than of healthy device, although in standby you loose battery power *much* more than you should (~12x more in total standby aka test1).

As it persist through reflash, I guess that hardware failure - and our wild guess of bluetooth being responsible - might be correct. Sadly, I'm not sure if you have any possibility of fixing it completely, but if yes, it would definitely upgrade your standby times (in other words = worth a shot).

I thought about who you could ask re those bluetooth messages in dmesg, but I don't have any good ideas(maybe kernel-power maintainers know something about this stuff? Just wild guess...)

/Estel

Re: N900 battery drain
 

If it is indeed a hardware failure, the most I'm capable of, is to take the device apart tighten and clean the connectors, put it back again and hope against hope that it works! As I remember from the last time I dissassembled it, a couple of flex connectors did feel like they could come loose.

FYI, there are no bluetooth messages in dmesg now (after successfully unloading the bluetooth and hci_h4p modules), save one. I'll definitely need help with pursuing the bluetooth line further.

If none of these work, I think I'll still be reasonably happy with the status quo. It's rather inconvenient swapping batteries and charging them 24/7, but at least the device is usable and I don't miss bluetooth at all (only ever used it a handful of times, anyways).

Also looking for a new battery that is known to work, if only to eliminate the battery factor as a possible cause. I find several recommended brands here, but none of them appear to be available here. May have to take a chance and go for a Nokia on Ebay.