Screwy battery life
 

Sorry for posting this here but I did a search for battery, battery life, "battery life", battery+life and I get pages and pages of unrelated results.

Anyway, the battery life on my N810 (with latest software and updates) is very unstable during non-use. Sometimes after a recharging the battery status will display something like "When idle 7 days, When in use: 5 hours". Now sometimes the N810 live up to the stated status, BUT other times I will fully charge it in the morning, Make sure the wireless is off, lock the keys, but when I check it in the evening about 10 to 12 hours later. it is completely dead.

I don't think the battery is coming to the end of it's life cycle because I'll recharge the N810 and it'll last for 4 to 5 days. It'll be Ok for a few draining / recharge cycles, THEN without warning, AND seemingly with enough juice to last a few days, it'll be dead 10 hours later. AND THIS IS JUST WHEN IT'S IDLE! WTF

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Hello,
I had the same problem and I was going nuts...
Until I discovered that every morning I had some alarms (from mCalendar) going off on the screen.
I don't know why, but the alarms keep the screen on until you cancel them (if you see it) or until the batery is dead.

Please check this...
:)

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Kind of what I'm seeing, but it wasn't always that way until recently when I've started using usb control with a flash drive and even though I disable the drive from the N810 and quit the program, my battery life is all over the map on the Nokia. I leave it running with plenty of battery capacity overnight, and when I wake up in the morning it's dangerously close to empty. Don't know if usb control is the cause, but it's the only thing that I've started doing different lately. I'm also switching between the original nokia battery and a mugen battery and both are doing the same thing. I've rebooted the N810 and I have not been running usb control lately to see if the N810's battery life is consistent or not and if that could be what's causing it.

This might have absolutely nothing to do with your situation, but it's funny how our battery cycle is similar where you can have a full charge and then a half day later, it'll be dead. Using USB control is the only thing that I've been using lately to test with a flash drive and even if I only watch say for example a divx movie for a couple of minutes ( which shouldn't drain that much battery juice ) and exit usb control, the battery drain will continue to kill the battery within half a day.

I'll post back if I no longer have the issue when not using usb control.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

i had similar issues:
take a look at these 2 threads

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=25683

and
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=25941

i ended up purchasing a new oem battery from amazon and ALL my battery issues have disappeared.

YMMV

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Hi, I would suggest installing the Advanced Power applet to track your battery battery consumption during idle time. The applet displays battery level in percentage which you could monitor hourly -- it should use only about 0.5% per hour during idle state. Otherwise, some applications is sucking power (another reason is mis-behaving or corrupted SD card).

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...d.php?p=241127

Re: Screwy battery life
 

I'm not using USB Control but I do have maemo-control-usb. But I do got 12 hald-addon-omap-gpio process running (but with o% load). What the heck are they?

Re: Screwy battery life
 

GPIO sounds like the interface to the hardware keys to me. But I could be wrong.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

General Purpose I/O
Wiki

It's strange to have 12 processes (I've got only 6), but everything can happen :)

Re: Screwy battery life
 

This is all well and good, but how does this methodology eliminate the unknown variable which is battery condition?
If advancedpower showed current consumption - you would be on to something - but it doesn't. Since it shows percentage it is using an assumption that battery capacity is a known - which it isn't for anyone who is having these sorts of issues.
I am aware that the original poster has dismissed battery condition as a cause - and he has a decently good reason for doing so - but that is not the same as proof. Stranger behavior has been seen from a faulty / dying LiIon.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Callanish - Interesting, I've been having similar problems lately and it wasn't until reading your comment that I realized I've been using USB Control more than usual lately as well.

I know that if you exit USB Control after switching to host mode it leaves it in that state. I'm wondering if that's what's causing the battery drain (wild speculation on my part). Perhaps switching back to peripheral before exiting will help (more wild speculation)?

Haven't tested this, just a thought.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Thanks for the info. You know, I never thought about that until you mentioned it. It seems logical that host mode would continue to drain the battery. All I did was disconnect from USB and close the program but failed to take it off of host mode. I'll have to try that. If that's the answer, a huge thanks and a big ooops on my part for not realizing that could be the answer.

I'll follow up with an updated post after I've done some testing and if someone comes across the same issue, they'll find the answer here.

I appreciate the help

-------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry to hijack the thread tokyodan temporarily, but just to add another big thanks go gbgb for his suggestion, because his advice solved my problem. After doing some testing, my battery doesn't drain the way it did, so I'll just have to remember to turn host mode off when using usb control. Saved me the problem of thinking I had two dying batteries. Think I'll also install pton's advanced power applet recommendation to monitor anything that could drain the battery in the future.

Thanks again guys.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

I have a question for all of you who are having battery problems?

Do you use Canola?

I'm not sure right now but my battery seems to last forever when after doing a power reset I never start up Canola. As far as I can remember, it seems that my screwy battery life kicks in after having used Canola. I'm going to keep an eye on this from now on.

And I'd like to ask whoever is having battery problems and using Canola to keep an eye on it too?

Re: Screwy battery life
 

i haven't had canola on my machine for about 8 months and i had battery issues (see my prior post in this thread)

Re: Screwy battery life
 

What do you use in Canola's place? MediaBox? They both use mplayer which may be the culprit. I'm now convinced that Canola is my problem. Since I haven't started up Canola I'm now going on Day 3 with stable battery life.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

i use mplayer

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Check existence of mplayer processes after closing it using XTerm
And kill existing ones.
MPlayer's processes drain battery very fast, 'cause CPU is always at max frequency.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

prk60091, then it must be MPlayer which probably keeps on keepin' on even after Canola or MediaBox are quit.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Is the problem with mplayer remaining running after quitting MediaBox reliably reproducable? MediaBox attempts to stop mplayer when you quit it, but maybe for some reason this doesn't always work.
I'm working on this.
A workaround would be to let MediaBox run in the background when not in use. It kills mplayer after some minutes and drains no battery. After that, it should be safe to quit MediaBox.

Canola on the other hand starts several processes in the background (not only mplayer). After quitting Canola I often have "atabake" and "canolad" left in memory consuming RAM (and maybe CPU).

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Wow! turned on wifi at 6am this morning and forgot to turn it off. now it's 6:15pm and i sttill got 2 hours of 'in use' time left. i guess stawing away from mplayer is the reason my n810 is behaving so well with the battery life. (of course the n810 was idle from 6:30am till now. but the wifi was on.)

Re: Screwy battery life
 

You might want to try "top" in a terminal. You dynamicaly get the top CPU users by %. I've just started experiencing battery issues in my 6 month old N810. I leave it on 24/7 but turn off networking at night. All of a sudden it's been dead before my wake up alarm goes off. I'm used to having this batterty technology lasting for years in other devices. I'm continuing to monitor my battery status but have become concerned enough to order a new 1800maH battery from Mugen for about $30. They have a good reputation and the 1500maH Nokia batteries seem to run close to $50. What battery life should I be experiencing with the N810?

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Thanks, I'll try that top command.

I guess it wasn't mplayer (nor Canola and other media player apps that use it) causing the sudden dying battery after all because the other night I went to bed with the battery reporting 3 days of idle time, nothing special was running, wifi was off. And I never use USB networking. The next morning I woke up and my N810 battery was dead.

I can't remember what I did on my N810 before I want to bed. I just know that I didn't run any app that uses mplayer.

(I might have done a USB file xfer from my PC via the USB cable with the N810 acting as a removable hard disk. This is not USB networking.)

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Using the 'top' command I see that after a reboot I have 5 maemo-launch processes running. Four of them are using less than 1% but one is .7% to 2.3%...not much, so they can't be the culprit.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Reboot might be a good way to elimate any dangling unneeded processes that refuse to die. I almost never reboot because the idle battery use was so low.

UPDATE: After a reboot and 24+ hours I can safely say my battery life appears to be back to normal. From now on if I have any degraded battery performance events I will do a reboot and see if that solves the problem. Normally my tablet is on 24/7 and never is rebooted.

Re: Screwy battery life
 

Just wanted to report that since I've used UISB control to change the USB status to "peripheral" myh battery life has increased by leaps and bounds. It's almost like when it was fresh out the box. I think previously I was leaving it is peripheral mode. Seems this was sucking juice all day.