Excessive battery drain when idle
 

The other day my N900 drained the battery to the point that it would no longer even charge it. I bought another one off eBay and not only did it take forever to charge over USB but it dropped from1000mah to 750mah in a little under 2 hours. I've been reading threads on here all day but I can't seem to use them to fix the problem.
Below is my output from powertop which as you can see has core at 100% on which I guess is my problem.
I've got no idea why this has started happening as I've changed nothing on the phone and I have no idea how to stop it. Does anyone know what I can do to solve this or at least try and diagnose the problem?

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

No idea also here what causes your core to stay on always, as rest of powertop output seems quite okay.

Just try a full power cycle:
shut down
remove battery
push power button for more than 3 seconds
insert battery
start up
and check again ...

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Done and done. Looks pretty much the same to me.
This is really annoying because its basically rendered my N900 useless as a mobile phone as its not longer very mobile.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Make sure your using powertop with the charger disconnected, and the screen and keys locked.
You say you haven't changed any software but have you had any updates?

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Unplugged the USB cable, power cycled the N900 and re-ran powertop with a sleep 10s beforehand to ensure I got the keyboard closed and the screen locked in time.
Not really sure why neon is selected as its not lit at any point.
No updates either.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Maybe you could monitor your process list for a while:
ps -e

If the process IDs after a reboot differ a lot from the process IDs after a couple of minutes without starting/stopping anything (exept the ps process itself), this could be an indicator for something, that is restarting/crashing regularely.

Edit: And use "top". Press "c" after starting top, so it sorts your processes, that use most of the CPU.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

ps looks the same after being run just after boot and just before turning off the phone. Top only shows two things using cpu and that's what you'd expect, top and Xorg.

I'm beginning to think that a reflash may be in order but I don't want to rick flashing the phone if the battery is liable to die on me in the middle of it because it takes so long to charge.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Well, I had a similar issue a while ago.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=85701
Never really got to the bottom of it. Never had any trouble of that nature since.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Or something like this?
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=90140&page=2

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Delete your thumbnail cache, rebuild tracker databases and uninstall kernel power settings.

Then try again (in offline mode).

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Deleted everything in ~/.thumbnails, ran tracker-processes -r and apt-get remove kernel-power-settings. Put it into offline mode and power-cycled. Still pretty much the same results.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

@Beeswax,

Are you using kernel-power? which version?
If so, please post the output of "kernel-config show" (as root).

Please post also the output of /etc/pmconfig.
Thank you.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

This is interesting, as I've noticed almost the same behaviour on mine. I'm on CSSU-S + KP52. Even though I'm on KP, I'm using default settings.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

I'm currently running KP52 although I had KP51 when the problem started, I upgraded after it started hoping to fix it but it didn't.
I had to reinstall kernel-power-settings to get kernel-config back, this is what kernel-config show outputs.
And this is /etc/pmconfig;
EDIT::
Just remembered that I am unable to remove kernel-power as kernel-power-uninstall fails with the following message,
Could forcing kernel and kernel-flasher to install restore the Nokia kernel?

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Do you have backup-menu installed?
And really want to know what is going on?

Just what I would do:
make a backup of rootfs and optfs, preferably on SD card
backup your MyDocs on PC
reflash completely (you may try first time only firmware, i.e. combined rootfs/optfs, but I'd suggest full flash eMMC also)
boot Maemo, let it opt (move parts from rootfs to optfs), let it settle (maybe tracker will run awhile)
and test it again.

If it still shows same weirdness, then it seems lile HW failure. :(
If not, I wish you good hunting ;) (but no idea where/how to start)

Before restoring the backup, you need to install same kernel (kp52), else you will have a reboot loop.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Welp.
Reflashed it with the stock kernel. Powertop shows the same usage of 100% on core. Also I'm now having problems with the touchscreen, it will randomly stop working and it can sometimes be for seconds or minutes. When it works its fine and as accurate as ever. So I'm guessing that somewhere there's a hardware fault which is a real shame as I've loved having this phone and I don't think there's anything even remotely like it out there.
Thanks for all your help guys but it seems like this was probably a lost cause.

tldr; phone borked, you're all great for trying.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

I wonder if you're not giving up too quickly... what does `dmesg` indicate? syslog?

Also, when you say you reflashed.. you reflashed rootfs? did you restore anything? I ask because you could easily be having an issue with the modules (/lib/modules)

if it really is hardware, most likely going on IRC will let you contact those who know the N900 very well, and who might be able to help you hunt down the offending hardware. you might just find it's a silly thing, eg lost magnet, lol

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

I reflashed using "RX-51_2009SE_20.2010.36-2.203.1_PR_COMBINED_203_ARM.bin" and then reinstalled powertop to see what it was saying. From a quick google I assume to check syslog I need to install syslogd?
dmesg gives me nothing obvious other than a lot of thisGoogle lead me here which is obviously why the touchscreen is not working correctly as the driver is constantly crashing for some reason.

If it is something in /lib/modules what would I need to be looking for?

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

ksyslog(d) from tools repo.

It was a full reflash, right? Not only kernel?
Please do it again and flash also eMMC (first).
Do you have a SD card inside? Please remove and try again.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

could potentially be an unseated ribbon cabe.

The ribbon that connects the screen to the main body can sometimes come loose. When it does, all sorts of weird **** happens.

Check yer ribbon cable before you fling that n900 in the trash.

Re: Excessive battery drain when idle
 

Seeing as the touchscreen works totally randomly if I keep opening and closing the slide I'm inclined to believe that the cable is loose. I've ordered another T6 screwdriver as I lost mine years ago and I'll update as soon as I've had it apart. Cheers again guys.