uConsole still often, unpredictably dying at 50%

uConsole
1

hey folks, I’m still getting frequent-but-unpredictable times when my uConsole dies at a supposed 50% battery charge.

possible causes I’ve read about:

  • weird power connector inside. I don’t know how to fix this more but I made a short video to see if I’m even understanding the problem correctly.
  • miscalibrated charge meter in the OS. I’ve tried setting /usr/class/power_supply/apx20_whatever/calibrate to 1 and then doing a full charge, full discharge cycle at least half a dozen times. would still love to know how to know when that process has decided it’s successfully done?

what am I missing? what fix have I missed?

2

also, here’s the batteries I’m using:

What should the max energy show up as when looking at uevent? Does the axp228 driver actually adjust those values based on the batteries used, or does it just lock in at an expected normal value?

3

Also also, stuff like this happened:

  • uconsole says it’s at 55%
  • use it for a few minutes, it dies
  • plug it in for 10 min, turn it on
  • now it says it’s at 5%

what am I doing wrooooooooooong

4

your battery tray is find, mine does that also. how long is it lasting before it dies? i’m using samsung 35Es and i get about 3-5 hours with a cm5 and 5-6 with a cm4.
the battery capacity is set but you can change it with this overlay. clockworkpi-custom-battery.dtbo
to use the overlay, in you config.txt add this line and edit to your needs.

dtoverlay=clockworkpi-custom-battery,charge_full_design_uah=<full charge in uAh>,energy_full_design_uwh=<full charge in uWh>

remove the <> in the config.

1 Like
5

Thanks, I had just seen some mentions of the devicetree and hadn’t figured out how to do anything with that yet.

Battery life seems equally unpredictable. Sometimes it only seems to last a couple hours, other times 5-6.

Also opening it up again and fiddling with the battery case and/or batteries sometimes seems to ‘reset’ it back to working.

I should probably just pull out the multimeter and start poking around on the case to see if something is loose or flaky.

1 Like
6

Still weird. Both batteries fully charge evenly, no obvious loose connections that I can tell. Might try different batteries but it still just seems weird that it’s so sure of being at half charge when it dies.