Uconsole battery and charging: a complete newbie perspective

uConsole
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This is my first day using uconsole and wanted to know if I understood things correctly:

  1. changing “ATTR{constant_charge_current_max}” and “ATTR{constant_charge_current}” value:
    I think charge speeds are acceptable now, but out-of-the-box charging speeds were not very good. I thought it might be because I skipped the initial wifi settings, which I assume didn’t trigger initial updates. After I got the password for my wifi I just used sudo apt-get update command since I knew RaspberryPi OS was debian based. But forgot to check if this was recommended by clockworkpi team. So I may have messed up here.
    After looking through this forum it seems everybody pretty much had same problems with the initial charging speed. I set the max value at 2200000, I think most people set this at 2500000, but I was worried so I set it a bit low. Now it’s been 19 minutes and charge went up by 21%. Which seems reasonable to me. But if you think this charging speed is abnormal and slow, please let me know.
    Edit: I use 3500mAh batteries

  2. The machine can be charged while turned off, but the charge indication light doesn’t turn on:
    Some other thread said this is normal, but wanted to hear 2nd opinions. Why would anyone design a device like this? I thought it was straight up not charging at first, due to slow initial charge speeds. But after changing the values above, it indeed is charging. Just that the charge indication light doesn’t turn on.

  3. The charging speed is faster when turned on…?:
    Some other thread said charging speeds are faster when the device is turned on, is this true?

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I really like the uConsole hardware but I’m convinced that ClockworkPi is not a software company. The fixes for the charging speed come from knowledgable users and developers in the community, not from ClockworkPi themselves. For charging, I use and recommend Trisweb’s settings from this thread.

There isn’t a charging light enabled in the standard firmware while the power is off, but Yatli wrote a driver that causes it to blink the power light on the DevTerm. Something similar could work on the uConsole, but what you are seeing is the default behaviour. Your device isn’t broken.

There’s a chip on the mainboard called an AXP228 which handles charging. My layperson’s understanding is that the driver on the uConsole tells it how much current it’s allowed to draw, and it remembers that number until it’s told something different. I haven’t tested it extensively but it seems like my device charges just as quickly while powered off.

Anyway, welcome to the community! This is very much a DIY linux handheld, so if something bugs you can either fix it yourself or hope it bugs a community-minded developer. There are a few people here working on alternate distros, which might end up being less janky.

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Thanks, this covered everything i needed to know.
I hope someone can recreate that driver for cm4 too. But I can live with LED not turning on since now I understand this is normal behaviour.