Battery discharging after long time connected to the power charger ?

Russell Sears sears at cs.berkeley.edu
Sun Jul 20 19:05:16 CEST 2008


Michael Shiloh wrote:
> 
> 
> Russell Sears wrote:
>> I've started noticing this too.  It bit me the night before last, when 
>> it was plugged in for 8 hours, but the icon indicated battery status. 
>> When I woke up, APM reported the battery was low. (I've been regularly 
>> running opkg update/upgrade on the factory image).
>>
>> Plug the charger into the phone.  Slowly count to 10 or 20.  If the 
>> icon doesn't change to have a lightning bolt, unplug the charger from 
>> the phone, and repeat.
> 
> here's another thing to try: make sure the phone is really charging, 
> either with 500mA or 1000mA (assuming you're using the wall charger), 
> using Andy's patch that lets you manually set any charge rate:
> 
> http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/openmoko-kernel/2008-July/003761.html
> 
> Let me know the result of this experiment
> 
> Michael

I'm still trying to reproduce the part where it actually runs the
battery down while plugged in, so I haven't applied the kernel patch.
(Perhaps it was accidentally unplugged or something...)  In the meantime:

What's the desired policy for charging?  Could the charger be shutting
off once the battery is full?  I've heard that doing this is standard
procedure for Li-Ions, since they don't like to be continuously topped
off...

My phone is plugged into the charger right now, and says it's not
charging.  It said it was charging an hour ago, so now its just a
matter of waiting...   I'll disable power management, enable wifi, gps,
etc, and see if that gets it to drain the battery while charging.

charger_type contains:

charger 1A mode 1A

chgstate:
enabled usb_present

chgcur is empty

chgmode:
enabled

apm says:
Off-line, battery status high:
98% (5d+3:01:00)

** Update **

I was having some problems with my mail client, so this has been sitting 
in my outbox.  Anyway, I left the phone on the charger last night, woke 
up and it was on with the red and exclamation point in the battery 
status icon.  I pulled the charger plug out of the phone and reinserted 
it, which shut down the phone.  I can't turn it back on, so I'm going to 
buy a second battery and/or external charger today...  It seems the best 
way to reproduce the issue is with a batter that's not nearly full.

-Rusty





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