[qtmoko] flight mode power consumption / turning gsm back on

[NeilBrown]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 08:21:20 -0400 Benjamin Deering
<ben_deering at swissmail.org> wrote:

> On 08/28/2012 07:44 AM, robin wrote:
> > hi ben,
> >
> > could you please give some more detail on how do you set it in woods mode?
> > and does the gsm power on afterwards correctly or do you have to restart the
> > phone?
> >
> > thanks
> >
> > robin
> >
> >
> > ps: here is the link to the paper on powerconsumption of the freerunner:
> >
> > http://www.ssrg.nicta.com.au/publications/papers/Carroll_Heiser_10.pdf
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Openmoko community mailing list
> > community at lists.openmoko.org
> > http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
> >
> I use SHR most of the time, but the same thing should apply.  I just 
> meant to change the GUI to call 'airplane mode' 'woods mode' because my 
> phones go in the woods and I don't fly very much at all.  I suspect 
> something is wrong with airplane mode on both qtmoko and SHR for gta04 
> if airplane mode doesn't use less power.  Transmitting would be the 
> biggest power draw and even if the modem remained powered up power 
> consumption should drop unless it is transmitting.
> 
> On gta02, I could turn 'airplane mode' off and on and it usually 
> worked.  I never spent a lot of time watching power consumption on 
> gta02, but I did keep track of battery life.  On gta04, we are still 
> figuring out power management and I had some charging issues so I was 
> dumping 'current_now' once a second in various configurations.  A 
> somewhat unrelated thing  I noticed and should report is that the 'idle 
> dim' state of fsodeviced actually uses more power.  The process of 
> smoothly dimming the display wakes up the CPU and by the time it settles 
> back down, it is time to turn off the display anyway.
> 
> I didn't mean to steer this away from qtmoko, but I think most of the 
> power related issues we are seeing are happening at a low level and 
> apply to all distros.

On a GTA02 you power off the GSM chip by writing
  AT at POFF
to the modem.  This definitely reduces power usage quite a lot.
You then typically write '0' to the 'power_on' and 'reset' sysfs files,
but that isn't so important I think.

If you are using gsm0710muxd, it will do all that for you when you tell it to.
You need to use some D-Bus command that I'm not familiar with.
Something like

 bus-send --system --print-reply --type=method_call \
   --dest=org.pyneo.muxer /org/pyneo/Muxer \
     org.freesmartphone.GSM.MUX.SetPower bool:false

maybe.

NeilBrown
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