Since installing Cognition, my Captivate's battery life has gotten steadily worse, and I'm reasonably sure that the calibration is off. As it is, even with 3G off, I still barely make it to the end of a regular day. Something's very wrong with the battery calibration. I did flash on a less-than-full battery, which is probably what caused the problem in the first place.
For example: A little while ago, I discharged the battery until the phone shut itself off. I was then able to restart from the same battery two more times (without charging), both times showing 3-4% remaining. The phone stayed on a reasonable amount of time with those charges, and shut itself off nicely when it read <1%.
Just now, i plugged it in, turned it on, and it immediately read 17%. It is now draining at a rapid speed, but it still has too much charge to truly be anywhere near empty. My multimeter reads 3.61v on the 3.7v battery, just for reference.
I recalibrated my battery just yesterday, but there is still a discrepancy between the percent when off and the percent when on. I don't believe I'm actually charging to 100% capacity or draining to 0.
Cutting to the chase: How do I completely zero-out my battery stats and actual charge at the same time for an accurate calibration?
Battery calibration that we follow here is strictly for the OS. Battery too has a chip in it that sends the readings to OS. Let ur battery do its charge-discharge cycles over a couple weeks, and see if its adjusted. Try not to delete ur battery stats again n again. Give both OS and battery to adjust to each other.
Jergling said:
Since installing Cognition, my Captivate's battery life has gotten steadily worse, and I'm reasonably sure that the calibration is off. As it is, even with 3G off, I still barely make it to the end of a regular day. Something's very wrong with the battery calibration. I did flash on a less-than-full battery, which is probably what caused the problem in the first place.
For example: A little while ago, I discharged the battery until the phone shut itself off. I was then able to restart from the same battery two more times (without charging), both times showing 3-4% remaining. The phone stayed on a reasonable amount of time with those charges, and shut itself off nicely when it read <1%.
Just now, i plugged it in, turned it on, and it immediately read 17%. It is now draining at a rapid speed, but it still has too much charge to truly be anywhere near empty. My multimeter reads 3.61v on the 3.7v battery, just for reference.
I recalibrated my battery just yesterday, but there is still a discrepancy between the percent when off and the percent when on. I don't believe I'm actually charging to 100% capacity or draining to 0.
Cutting to the chase: How do I completely zero-out my battery stats and actual charge at the same time for an accurate calibration?
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Click to collapse
If you are on the newest version of Cognition with DG's Cog kernel there is some trouble with it. DG knows about it and is working on a fix. You'd know that if you are reading the Cog thread.
ROM-specific posts should go in their matching sticky in the Q&A subforum. Had you looked in there you would have seen the battery issues with the current version and that DG is working on it.
A search of battery stats would also have answered your question about that aspect. SGSTools allows you to delete battery stats easily.
I guess it might have been faulty to assume that this is a general hardware problem, but I'm not using the newest build of Cog. I'll check my version and then read the release log in the thread l, then. In the meantime I'll go through a couple charge cycles before making any judgements.
Please post in the threads already opened.
On that note, thread closed
Related
My original device always seems to take forever to go below 100%, and I just got a new device that has the opposite issue - it never goes above 94%. So I did some further tests, tonight.
My 94% device goes down fairly steadily once unplugged. But, the device at 100% does not. Also, when the 100% device is drained and I recharge it, it still says it's charging when its at 100% - so what does this mean?
I think that the battery calibration is off, as we already assumed. So, my 94% device is really 100% and I suspect that it would survive beyond 0% as it probably still has 6% juice left in reality. And, in the case of the 100% device, it's probably mis-calibrated to 105 or 110% (or more?). Since the UI can't show you 105%, it just shows the max of 100% until it goes below 100% which can take some time. I also suspect that the device would cut out at 5% or 10% since it's actually drained completely.
So that's the reason, I think. As to the fix, I don't know. What's weird is that these two devices are so different in terms of how the battery status is calibrated.
How can this be fixed? Or "Recalibrated?
I'm letting one of them completely drain, to see what happens.
At least the 94% one gives me an idea on what the battery life is, since I can just tack on +6%. But the one stuck at 100% is a complete mystery - it could be 5% off, 10% or even more.
Also, these run on 2 cell batteries making 7.4V nominal. All the devices before are using single cell batteries at 3.7V nominal. So Android may have issues with that voltage difference.
roebeet said:
I'm letting one of them completely drain, to see what happens.
At least the 94% one gives me an idea on what the battery life is, since I can just tack on +6%. But the one stuck at 100% is a complete mystery - it could be 5% off, 10% or even more.
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I had the 100% battery issue before and it took a long time for it to dip below 100% (so long that it seemed unreal). Later I decided to let it drain to zero before recharging it to full again. Since then the battery indicator seemed to behave normally and discharged at a normal rate when the tablet was in use.
Have you tried deleting /data/system/batterystats.bin to wipe battery status? Mine sits on 100% for ages so I'm trying this now.
roebeet said:
My original device always seems to take forever to go below 100%, and I just got a new device that has the opposite issue - it never goes above 94%. So I did some further tests, tonight.
My 94% device goes down fairly steadily once unplugged. But, the device at 100% does not. Also, when the 100% device is drained and I recharge it, it still says it's charging when its at 100% - so what does this mean?
I think that the battery calibration is off, as we already assumed. So, my 94% device is really 100% and I suspect that it would survive beyond 0% as it probably still has 6% juice left in reality. And, in the case of the 100% device, it's probably mis-calibrated to 105 or 110% (or more?). Since the UI can't show you 105%, it just shows the max of 100% until it goes below 100% which can take some time. I also suspect that the device would cut out at 5% or 10% since it's actually drained completely.
So that's the reason, I think. As to the fix, I don't know. What's weird is that these two devices are so different in terms of how the battery status is calibrated.
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Click to collapse
samepic said:
I had the 100% battery issue before and it took a long time for it to dip below 100% (so long that it seemed unreal). Later I decided to let it drain to zero before recharging it to full again. Since then the battery indicator seemed to behave normally and discharged at a normal rate when the tablet was in use.
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Click to collapse
I tried that once, by setting it to never shutoff and letting it go over night. The next morning I charged it to green plus 30m as someone suggested in the TnTL thread, but I still had the problem of the meter sticking at 100% for a long time.
Anyways, I installed 3.0.0(TnTL) on monday and decided to also use the CWM clear battery data option, and now it seems to be dropping more as expected, but I'm not entirely sure that I did it completely correctly as by the time that I did the clear battery data option it would've been below 100% charge since I did so AFTER running the update.zip... just have to wait and see now...
Battery Stays at 100% For Ages
My battery stayed at 100% for ages the first time I charged it. Then it dropped quickly and cut out around 50%. I recharged it and it seems to be behaving more normally now. It still seemed to hang at 100% for a while, but no where near as long as the first time. I'm waiting to see at what percentage it dies this time.
my zt 180 tablet never got above 94% also. And it dropped pretty quickly and at around 40% it seemed to get a second life and slow down, but eventually it went all the way down to about 10% and then I would charge it (about 3 hours max). It too is a 7.4v supply.
My Odroid T had a 3.4 supply and it was pretty linear, showed charged at 100% and went down accordingly, though the developers had some issues with a few software releases where it did behave erraticaly and they did a few patches that fixed it.
roebeet said:
My original device always seems to take forever to go below 100%, and I just got a new device that has the opposite issue - it never goes above 94%. So I did some further tests, tonight.
My 94% device goes down fairly steadily once unplugged. But, the device at 100% does not. Also, when the 100% device is drained and I recharge it, it still says it's charging when its at 100% - so what does this mean?
I think that the battery calibration is off, as we already assumed. So, my 94% device is really 100% and I suspect that it would survive beyond 0% as it probably still has 6% juice left in reality. And, in the case of the 100% device, it's probably mis-calibrated to 105 or 110% (or more?). Since the UI can't show you 105%, it just shows the max of 100% until it goes below 100% which can take some time. I also suspect that the device would cut out at 5% or 10% since it's actually drained completely.
So that's the reason, I think. As to the fix, I don't know. What's weird is that these two devices are so different in terms of how the battery status is calibrated.
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Click to collapse
Warning: Slightly off topic -
I'm glad Roebeet was able to get a 2nd Gtab. Hope you found a good discount. Happy Holidays!!!
Now back to the topic discussion...
Butch1326 said:
Warning: Slightly off topic -
I'm glad Roebeet was able to get a 2nd Gtab. Hope you found a good discount. Happy Holidays!!!
Now back to the topic discussion...
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Click to collapse
Off-Topic x2 : yep, got used one that another XDA user had returned!
On-Topic: Still waiting for the battery to discharge, it went to sleep last night. Getting close....
roebeet said:
Off-Topic x2 : yep, got used one that another XDA user had returned!
On-Topic: Still waiting for the battery to discharge, it went to sleep last night. Getting close....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I also had the issue of battery showing 100% for a long time and then cutting out around at 50%. One of the posts mentioned doing a battery stat wipe in CWM after charging to 100% + 30 minutes.
I did this with a little twist of my own.
I allowed the battery to drain completely and tab to shut off. Plugged in the charger and immediately did a battery wipe in CWM. Allowed the battery to charge fully upto 100% + let it be on charger for additional time till the battery symbol in the notification bar no more showed charging sign. Again did the battery stat wipe in CWM and then rebooted the tab.
Since then i observe that the battery has been draining as it should be expected to. down to 72% after about 4+ hours of use. I will still be monitoring the battery discharge further for two or three more charge cycles. But I feel doing battery stat wipe in cwm 2 times at full drain and then again at full charge might have helped caliberate it properly.
Let me know if anyone else tries this and gets same or different observations.
Try installing this to measure your current usage over the life of the battery... (dont have a GTab and still considering). Since most likely this widget and the battery monitor are using the same API we will see if its a hardware sensor issue or a software issue...
http://www.appbrain.com/app/currentwidget/com.manor.currentwidget
I suspect its in their battery monitor and not the sensor or API... if that is the case it should be easy to debug (if you have the source). Typically these issues are due to poor polling algorithms...
Im new to android so I am unfamiliar with profiling capabilities of the platform...(Still learning)
Perhaps this will be one of the 'little fixes' that will be present in the latest FW update when VS drops it tomorrow. I have the 100% unit BTW. A fix would be nice.
Reading this thread this morning it got me thinking about my gtab battery situation. When I first got the gtab, the battery stayed at 100% for hours, then the percentage dropped like a rock. Over time, the battery dropped in more regularly, although it drops in large numbers (like from 100% to 83%, then to 67%, and so on). I'm currently running TnT Lite 3.0.
This morning I charged the battery to 100%, and while plugged in (to the AC outlet), I reset the battery stats using cwm. The battery today has been steadily going down throughout the day as I would expect. In over 8 hours, I watched the battery go down steadily from 100% to 84%. So far, so good.
my exp
Tried draining once, just let it sit, didn't fix it.
Tried again but this time I kept the screen on and watched the voltage, shutdown was near 6.8 volts. Now the meter is accurate. YMMV...
@it'sDon - it wasn't fixed in the update.
I was in the same boat as most of you. Took a very long time to go down from 100% and then zonked out completely at ~10-15%. It's now been charging for a few hours and it's been sitting at 100% for quite a while but the light is still red (so it's still charging) which means it will probably happen again looks like it's charging to some value over 100% and when it discharges, knocks out while the meter is still reading as having juice. Roebeet is 100% on the money.
I am going to try the CWM battery value reset some of you mentioned to see if it does something once my light is green, then I won't charge it and watch it like a hawk once it hits 20% to see if it shuts down at 10-15% or a value less than 3% which is acceptable I think.
I never had a problem on my stock(ish) g-tablet. That is until I installed the latest update.
I had to do a data wipe before any of the cosmetic TnT changes would show. After that the battery now seems stuck at 100%. This wasn't that way before, so I will try draining the battery, and see what happens.
Since I found that this was tied to my latest update, I think that I should call CS and complain.
My battery drain didn't make a difference, either. Still haven't pinned down a fix that works.
At least those of you with 94% max have a general idea when your battery will die. With us "100% forever" ones, we have no clue.
Actually, I may not have a problem after all. I have had my tablet on for about two hours. It is now showing the battery at 86%.
I'm having issues with my phone shutting off when the battery meter is low but not dead.The indicator will be yellow and still shut off. When I power it back on and plug it in, its completely dead .
is the phone innacurately reporting the battery percentage?
Sounds like the battery isn't conditioned correctly. There are apps in the market to help with that.
Look in battery configs battstats prob in /data/system and prob elsewhere
Sent from my HTC VLE_U using xda premium
Arent there other ways to condition the battery with an app? i heard like running the phone to empty and then fully charging? any advice?
The problem with running it empty is the battery will never fully discharge because the phone is reading the stats incorrectly.
can you recommend any specific app for this? do you have to be rooted?
You'd have to look at the requirements per app but I do believe you need root.
Your phone isn't going to report one thing, but "believe" a different thing because of bad battery stats. A Google employee has already debunked "conditioning" your battery by deleting battery stats; the phone uses it for reference only, not to make any decisions, especially when to shut down. Something is wrong with the battery itself, or your phone, not your stats.
Swyped, not typed, from my Digital Brick
It might be better over time. Had mine for two weeks now, and I had it run out on me three times. First time it shut down at about 13% left on the meter, second time around 8% and this last time at 2%. Good enough for me, but it's annoying if an untampered new phone doesn't report at least somewhat close to real battery-state.
I usually hook it on the charger at 15%-30% (approx 12-16 hours usage) in the evening, and sometimes have a few short charges (25-30 minutes) from the car-charger during the day.
I've never let mine get below 50% since I got it, but I just ran it into the ground with a terminal process ('yes && yes') and it went all the way to 0% and then powered off.
I have long suspected something was wrong here. So last night, I charged my G2X to 100%, then turned the phone completely OFF!
Nine hours later I turned my phone back on, saw the nice Trinity animation, and saw that my battery was now at 89%!!!
WTF? Can anyone tell me what's going on here? My battery is only 7 months old! How does the battery drain so much with the phone off???
It could be that the battery is lying when it's at 100%... but I have read that the g2x drains while shut off.
Next time charge to 100, reboot phone, see what % it's at, then shut off the phone and test.
When I had charged the battery to 100%, I had left it connected to the charger for about five hours at 100%.
EEngineer said:
When I had charged the battery to 100%, I had left it connected to the charger for about five hours at 100%.
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Click to collapse
Still doesn't change the fact that it could be lying.
Sent from my LG-P999 using XDA
Mine does this along with a few others, there is a thread on the subject already.
Sent from my LG-P999 using xda premium
mt3g said:
Mine does this along with a few others, there is a thread on the subject already.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Some say it could be the kernel, but there doesn't seem to be any resolution.
As to battery gauge accuracy, I have Battery Monitor Widget Pro installed and it verifies the sensor accuracy.
Charged to 100%, pulled the battery & let it sit for 8 hours. Just put the battery back in and the fuel gauge and Battery Widget Pro both say 100%.
With the way virtually every rechargable battery works this is pretty normal. When you charge a phone battery or anything really overnight it doesn't actually take the whole time to reach 100%. Most phones only require a few hours and after it hits the 100% mark it actually starts draining a little (as you have it plugged in) to about 95% or a little lower (your phone however is programmed to still display 100% to reduce user anxiety and will slowly adjust to the actual battery percentage as time goes on) And as someone already said, leaving the battery in the phone (even while it is off) will drain the battery too. This can be fixed by simply removing the battery until you want to use it.
ehafling said:
With the way virtually every rechargable battery works this is pretty normal. When you charge a phone battery or anything really overnight it doesn't actually take the whole time to reach 100%. Most phones only require a few hours and after it hits the 100% mark it actually starts draining a little (as you have it plugged in) to about 95% or a little lower (your phone however is programmed to still display 100% to reduce user anxiety and will slowly adjust to the actual battery percentage as time goes on)
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This is false and contradicts my measurements. BTW, the Android battery API shows the real percentage of the battery and doesn't "display 100% to reduce user anxiety". A battery meter that lied about its charge would INCREASE user anxiety.
it is well known that modern Android phones, including iPhones, have sneak circuits that still operate when the phone is switched off, including the GPS. It's a big privacy issue.
Then why doesn't it happen all the time on all phones and roms? I can confirm while using hfp 2.1 it drained with phone off and battery inside, but on cm7 nightly latest and stock kernel it hasn't done it to me yet.
Sent from my LG-P999 using xda premium
Because it's up to the kernel. Different kernels behave differently when the phone is off.
Kernel
Prob Has to do with Kernel. Maybe its the battery driver your using.
For example I'm using Hellfire phoenix Rom with this Kernel > http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1073626
I can use the one with DebouchedSloth's Battery Driver "(funky readings, but great battery performance)" or with the Official CM7 Battery Driver "(smooth readings, but battery life is slightly less than DebouchedSloth's driver)"
I think it's because the phone isn't actually off when you "power it off." I say this because when it's "off" and you plug in a power source the screen shows a charging graphic almost immediately, so it must still be on in order to detect the charger and show something on screen that quickly.
I had mine charged to 100%, turned it "off", came back 3 weeks later and it was dead.
Not sure why they'd design it like that. I guess the phone needs to be "on" in some sense to be able to charge while "powered off." I assume other phones can charge the battery while the phone is actually completely off.
O.K., just lost 10% battery overnight when powered off.
I've read that a draining battery when off is caused by the Fast Boot setting. When powered off some things are still running so the phone boots up faster.
In OEM Android there is a "Setting > Power > Fast Boot" that I can uncheck, but on CM7 I can't find that setting. Any ideas?
I'm on CM10 8/31 and I've been noticing that my battery life has been really poor lately, so I wanted to find out what the problem was. I thought about draining my battery fully and then charging it again. Once I drained the battery, I charged it, and restarted the phone after the charging began. Once the phone booted, it reported a 50% or so charge. I'm wondering if my phone is stuck at reporting battery at half capacity, and that when it charges to 100%, it's actually 50%. Anything I can do?
EDIT: Also, I should note that the battery has sometimes spiked up/down by about 20% after a reboot (including today before the drain).
This phone has a fuel gauge chip, fully discharging and recharging will not calibrate it. False readings after reboot are common, you may even notice it will climb back up as it begins to accurately reflect level.
There are apps to let you know what is causing drain. BetterBatteryStats and CPUSpy are recommended a lot.
ALBGunner04 said:
I'm on CM10 8/31 and I've been noticing that my battery life has been really poor lately, so I wanted to find out what the problem was. I thought about draining my battery fully and then charging it again. Once I drained the battery, I charged it, and restarted the phone after the charging began. Once the phone booted, it reported a 50% or so charge. I'm wondering if my phone is stuck at reporting battery at half capacity, and that when it charges to 100%, it's actually 50%. Anything I can do?
EDIT: Also, I should note that the battery has sometimes spiked up/down by about 20% after a reboot (including today before the drain).
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Entropy doesn't frequent our forum much anymore, but he left some nuggets of wisdom behind.
As you have probably seen, he mentioned several times that generally our fuel gage doesn't need much attention. It may get a little out of whack if you have heavy usage followed by reboot, but generally the error is short-lived and goes away quickly (within an hour or so).
But apparently sometimes the fuel gage gets really confused, and in that case you can reset it (to un-confuse it) by powering down and pulling battery for 20-30 seconds. It certainly can't hurt to try.. that's what you try for any computer that was acting weird. That was discussed by Entropy here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1209087&highlight=+gingerbread+fuel+gauge+
By the way, here is a link to the fuel gage chip (MAX17040) used in Infuse
http://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX17040-MAX17041.pdf
It has a heuristic model of the battery. The only input is the battery voltage. So it looks at time history of voltage and provides an output signal. Exactly what the output is I’m not sure. You’d think it would be an estimate of %. But according to the circuit diagram there is no inputs to the MAX17040 other than battery voltage.
And yet our phone also knows when it’s charging. And our Infuse phone also has a sensor that enables it to measure current while charging (but not to measure current while discharging). This according to the developer of Battery Monitor Widget:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=31295223&highlight=infuse#post31295223
Why the heck would we not use sensed charging current and charging status as an input to calculating our % battery (since the signal does not go to the Max17040)? Beats me, doesn't make sense. Maybe the output of he fuel gage chip goes to the integrated power chip MAX8998 which looks at these other inputs (charging status and charging current) and develops the % estimate... I’m not sure.
Not sure what's happening with my phone, but after removing the plug on my fully charged phone, I will let my phone sit idle for about 10 mins, when I go wake the screen, I see that I've already lost 3% of battery capacity.
The weird part is after this initial 3% is gone, my battery will drain normally. Does this mean I need to calibrate my battery? Is there anyway to do this without damaging it?
It means you need to get a new hobby... seriously, why do you care if it changes nothing what so ever. In order to fix this, you should try not checking your battery percentage every 2 minutes. On the upside, this will probably give you another half hour of battery life as well.(damn a change of attitude would fix like 90% of problems on this site)
On a more serious note, it's likely just because your phone doesn't keep charging when it hits full charge, it stops charging in order to not kill your battery, and lets it drain to like 90% at which point it will charge back up to 100%, so it may be at any point in between when you disconnect it. Even if it is truly at 100% when you disconnect the charger, the measurements may not be completely accurate when approaching 100%, so it is likely, that could make it drop faster at first. You need to do nothing in order to fix this, seriously don't mess with it.
CoronaDelux said:
Not sure what's happening with my phone, but after removing the plug on my fully charged phone, I will let my phone sit idle for about 10 mins, when I go wake the screen, I see that I've already lost 3% of battery capacity.
The weird part is after this initial 3% is gone, my battery will drain normally. Does this mean I need to calibrate my battery? Is there anyway to do this without damaging it?
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Click to collapse
Are you running stock or custom kernel and any custom ROM? Ive noticed this sometimes too but that's because the phone, when unplugged is running services to start phone on battery power versus the cord/wall charger. Check logcats to see what happens when phone unplugged to see what may be happening when phone starts on battery.
I think you are worrying about it a little too much. It could be searching for service (which drains a lot of battery), starting services as someone previously said, heat is horrible for a battery, anything. If the drain is normal after that who knows it could be the ROM you are on, battery percentage not being reported correctly.
Not worth an RMA by any means. Reset battery stats in recovery and see how that works out for you.
Bear in mind, these batteries are cell batteries, a user who plugs their phone in every time the battery hits 50%, is going to notice over a period of time the time it takes to go from 100% to 50% is shorter and shorter, and suddenly, 49%-0 holds a better charge. If you're constantly charging your phone, you'll wear those cells of your battery down. This is where the "hoax" of always letting your battery drain to 0% when you get it to "maximize" battery potential came from.