How to see how full my battery is?

[Brian Wilson]

Yesterday when I was running ASU and had had the FR plugged in
overnight to its charger I looked at its screen and there was a popup
window was saying "your battery is really low, better recharge it
soon" (I paraphrase). I figured it was wrong. Since I was about to
reflash it with FSO  I checked the sysfs readings and found the entry
that said "this is probably most useful" and it said "91" which I took
to mean 91% so I figured it was okay. Maybe it meant 91% empty? I was
able to put it on USB and reflash without incident.

After putting FSO on it I now see an ambiguous battery picture. It
either shows almost full or almost empty. Then the FR started going to
sleep on me every 30 seconds or so. I would push the power button and
it would wake up again. It did not issue any kind of warning, it would
just fade to black. Eventually it seemed to die. So I plugged it back
in to the official charger and went to bed to recharge my own
batteries. I have not looked at it yet today.

I guess what I am saying is that I'd like to know what the sysfs
numbers mean  -- why did ASU think the battery was dead when the sysfs
said "91"?  I will try cat /proc/apm tonight but knowing how to
interpret it would be good too.

Can't I expect the FR to charge when it's plugged in to its own
charger or is there something else I have to do?

(I like the FSO image a lot more than ASU. But that would be a new topic.)

Brian


On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 8:23 AM, kazaam <kazaam at oleco.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:10:22 -0400
> Joe DiTommasso <wyznewski at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 'cat /proc/apm' in the terminal will show you the current charge level,
>> as well as the time to full charge or full discharge, depending on
>> whether the device is plugged in or not.
>
> This shows me:
>
> # cat /proc/apm
> 1.13 1.2 0x02 0x01 0x03 0x08 -1% -1 ?
>
> -1 % == battery_percentage
> -1 == battery_time
>
> is at least the description from here: http://wiki.openmoko.org/images/3/37/Om-daemons.pdf
>
> But what shall those negative values mean??