Battery discharging while plugged in

[Dale Maggee]

Angus Ainslie wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 9:37 AM, Mike Montour <mail at mmontour.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> That might be normal - the charger in the PCF50633 shuts off the charge
>> current once the battery is full, and turns it on again when the voltage
>> falls below a threshold. It seems that it can discharge quite a bit
>> before charging switches back on - in one test my battery got down to
>> around 75% before it started to charge again.
>>
>>     
>
> It doesn't completely turn off charging. It drops to a 100mA trickle charge
> which is insufficient to keep the battery topped up with the GSM radio
> turned on. That's why the batteries state of discharge is slower when its
> plugged into the charger ( even the wall charger )
>
> What should happen is when the battery reachs 100% charge the kernel should
> check to see if the GSM radio/WLAN/Bluetooth/GSP is turned on and set the
> trickle charge to the base 100mA plus whatever each of the powered
> components requires. As the amount that each of these radios uses varies
> depending on signal strength and Rx/Tx mode its not an exact science.
>
> Even just putting the charge mode to ~250mA would probably keep the battery
> charged up and the GSM radio happy.
>
> Is there a dbus signal for a full battery that a script could hook to setup
> this trickle charge state ?
>
> Angus
>   
it sounds like this could be what I'm seeing - I don't think I've ever 
let it get below 80% or so before unplugging and plugging it back in
 - I like to keep it as full as possible so that I have maximum life 
when I take it with me away from a power source.

Thanks,
-D