Stupid battery question - HTC 10 Questions & Answers

Does a bad battery cause spike in Ma or that's in hardware my battery is shot considering it goes to zero when I open camera at 30-40 percent

It doesn't spike in mA if the battery is getting older and you need a lot of power the Voltage can drop. If the Voltage drops below 3.3V the phone will shut down.
The Problem is that the voltage drops extremely fast so almost no logging software can log that, and it's gone after the crash anyway. So except external Battery monitoring hardware thats quite hard to proof.

Related

[Q] Battery drain application

Hi!
I'm looking for an application, that quickly kills my battery if it's low, so I can do a full charge to improve battery life.
Something, that I launch, I put my phone on the desk, have a tea meanwhile, and it's drained! Something, that turns on wifi, do some downloading, browsing, video playing, or whatever, and does it automatically without supervision. Does such app exists?
I'll second this, it'd be nice to have an app do this for me and maybe even give us some interesting stats from it?
Sent from my mind using telepathy
why would you want an application to destroy your battery?
Adevem said:
why would you want an application to destroy your battery?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Apparently if you do a full discharge the battery life will be longer.
Soniboy84 said:
Apparently if you do a full discharge the battery life will be longer.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
not really, you should avoid deep discharges...
Byr0x said:
not really, you should avoid deep discharges...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1 If you had been reading around...you would know Lithium Ion batteries are designed to 'maximize' their efficiency within about two weeks of 'top up' charging. Cycle-charging is generally considered a less efficient method of charging. You will need to 'TopUp charge' this means charging as much and as often as possible. If your battery is at 89% for instance and you find yourself near a socket, plug your adapter in and charge it up to 100%. After a few days of doing this you will notice an improvement in the life of your battery when you are not able to charge.
Actually,,,
It is not matter of running your battery down to 0%.
It is ok to run it down till phone does to power on itself.
As you know battery is a single cell Li-Ion @ 3.7v
when it is fully charged it's peak voltage is 4.2v
By the time battery mah is drained down (galaxy s has 1500mah)
battery voltage should be around 3.2~3.4v range. this will depend on condition of the battery.
Battery should never go below 3.2v personally, 3.4v is my cut off.
If your battery voltage goes below 3.2v... it's time for a new battery as this kind of voltage will damage your battery, either it will leak or puff (battery will actually get bloated.
Phone has a voltage cut off so it will not over charge over 4.2v but if it does, it will likely start to smoke and catch fire.
I am sure anyone who is into electric Radio control knows all about these batteries.
Oh btw,,, long time storage voltage should be 3.8v
You'll be asking how do I know what voltage my battery is... I personallly don't know of any apps but GPS Status actually shows the temperature & voltage of your battery.
Soniboy84 said:
I'm looking for an application, that quickly kills my battery if it's low, so I can do a full charge to improve battery life.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
First, take into consideration the comments above regarding deep discharge of your battery...but, to answer your question, there's an app in the market place called 'Battery Refresh' which attempts to drain your battery quicker.
Well if it's all true above than its a good sign, and thanks for the info! I'm not an expert but in the old times I remember batteries had to discharged completely, maybe even if it's just a few times. Now somebody can also tell me why my battery is discharging when it's plugged in the socket with original charger? All I do is using the internet, and has. nimbuzz and a live wallpaper on. :S
You could probably enable the GPS/BT/WIFI ( connected to a router ) and run the interactive mode on Neocore benchmark.. that should enable most of the hardware components on the phone and stress the GPU/CPU.. probably would see a 25% battery drain for every 35-40mins.
I don't know what has changed with the batteries but as far as I know...
it is good to discharge new batteries 3~4 times down until phone does not power on.
Like I have said... it's about the voltage of the battery, not whether battery has any juice left in it or not.
These batteries have a protective circuitry so that it will not charge over 4.2v,
also as for discharge it is usually down to 3v but usually with a charger/discharger units that can control mah/volts/amps. With typical usage from the phone, it'll likely be discharged down to about 3.2`3.4v. Which is very safe.
You can do whatever you feel but I personally do this to every batteries I have for phone and every batteries I use with my radio controled cars.
For my RC cars, I have about 6 batteries ranging from 1cell to 3cell LiPo packs.
Each cell is 3.7volts.
But you don't have to force discharge and hurry the process.
Just use the phone normally and let it run down to nothing... than recharge to full peak.
Than again, choice is yours.
I'm looking for the same kind of applications. It's very useful for recalibrating your battery. Wipe the battery history then do a full cycle.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
The old saying in RC Helicopters was that the difference between discharging 50% and 100% was the difference between getting 500 uses and 5 uses.
You should certainly avoid ever fully dischaging any lithium based battery.
Older nickel batteries (Ni-cd, Ni-MH) required full dischage cycles to get rid of memory the the metals pertained, lithium-ion and lithium-ion-polymer not only do not require this; but doing so will damage them.
And yes, the older ipods came with Nimh cells and they did reccomended full discharge cycles.
Im pretty sure the idea was to try not to let the voltage get below 3.5v/cell and never below 3.3. Dead flat is 3 or 2.85 which is when the battery simply cant produce any real current. The phone should have circuitry though to not let the voltage get above 4.25 or below ~3.5.. If the low battery warning comes on, set the brightness to dim, and stop any activities (unless its a phone call, its not THAT important but if youre playing games or watching a movie...) until yo can get to a charger.
By the way this being my first post (i meant to ages ago) Ill just mention that my galaxy S came with recovery mode and download mode Enabled, i got it just last month, Virgin network, Australia.
draining the battery fully was for the older battery types, new age batteries are not recommended to be drained fully
Thanks!
One more question:
I'm using my phone as a desktop replacement, because I don't have Internet at the moment. I'm using xda, dolphin browser and listening music. It's plugged into the mains and it's not charging. It says 49%, and stuck there. Is it possible I'm using too much battery?
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
Ok, this will be my last reply.
Fully draining or not is not the issue.
In RC, most modern electronic speed controllers have a built-in battery cut-off which will cut off power once it reaches certain voltage. Because OVER-draining battery without cut off can damage/kill/ or make it unable to hold voltage.
Also, once the battery voltage reach certain point (still within safe range) you will notice the motor being powered slow down. This would also be a recommended time to stop.
Cellular phones have built in safe cut off aswell. As I have said I have measured my battery after being full drained, voltage was around 3.55v or so. Which is very normal considering voltage of the battery is 3.7v only with peak charged voltage of 4.2.
Now, Someone mentioned that fully draining your battery repeatedly will dramatically reduce battery life.
Reducing life of the battery has more to do with the amount of AMP used to charge the battery. Faster charging is usually reduce battery life dramatically.
And without hobby grade chargers, you won't be able to control this charge rate.
Slow charge is better but charging at 1C rating is the normal. But charging at 1C means regardless of batteries mah rating, battery can be charged in about 60 minutes. As we all know, our phone batteries doesn't charge from zero to full in 60minutes, right? just like most of the portable devices it takes nearly 3~4hours to fully recharge. Last 20% usually takes longer because Amp provided to charge slowly lowers. That is why.
For example, if Galaxy S battery is 1500mah, than 1C charge rate is @ 1.5amp.
If battery is 3000Mah, 1C is 3.0Amps and so on.
So like I have said over and over before, drain your battery away if you have to by choice or not. Just use it up, I will bet you your battery will last longer than you keep your phone.
U should avoid draining ur battery to 0% (witch is not possible with ur phone. When it shows 0% the charge of the battery is at 10-15%). Li-ion batteries dont have a memory effect, so it would be usless discharching it completely anyhow. Best for sgs battery is charging it before it goes under 50% that will improve the lifetime of ur battery (not how long it lasts before u have to charge but how long it lasts before u have to go and buy a new one)
How do i know? Simply cause i had to learn that a few weeks ago for the job im learning.
@xxgg: yes ur right, it wont really damage the battery if u runn it till thr phone shows its empty. But using an app to drain battery as quick as possible will, since the app forces the battery to give out more Ampere than its built to give out
Sent from my GT-I9000 using Tapatalk

[Q] low battery shutdown

whats the latest on the battery? i've read a lot of posts here about shutdown but not really found an answer. i have 2 different batteries, std 1350 and a 1600 which i swap as needed so i dont expect the battery meter to be really accurate, but it seems that either battery goes from about 25% then just dies. not sure if it actually shuts down cleanly on low power but certainly there is no warning.
apart from carrying a spare (which i do) whats the best work around?
i've no idea what a real android phone does when the battery is low.
in theory android shutdown the phone before the battery level is too low.
But on low battery values or when you switch between battery the kernel hasn't a good battery level resolution, so the battery run out before android can shutdown.
gazzacbr said:
whats the latest on the battery? i've read a lot of posts here about shutdown but not really found an answer. i have 2 different batteries, std 1350 and a 1600 which i swap as needed so i dont expect the battery meter to be really accurate, but it seems that either battery goes from about 25% then just dies. not sure if it actually shuts down cleanly on low power but certainly there is no warning.
apart from carrying a spare (which i do) whats the best work around?
i've no idea what a real android phone does when the battery is low.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The kernel re-calibrates the battery level based on voltage and current when it first boots after the battery has been removed. The calibration is not very accurate, and might be off by 10 or even 20 percent. But, when the voltage drops low enough, the kernel will calibrate the battery level again, and you should see it reading under 5% before it dies. The actual shutdown happens when the battery sensor detects 3V or less. In the kaiser, that doesn't seem to be controlled by the kernel, so I think we can't do anything about it. I don't think we want to, either, since it is quite bad to run a Lithium Polymer battery at less than 3V. It would be nice to have an interrupt at 3V instead of an abrupt shutdown, so we could do a clean shutdown. Except, of course, we haven't yet figured out that clean shutdown.
If your kernel is older than November 6th, or if you use 2.6.25, you should update to a more recent 2.6.32 kernel for better battery readings.

[Q] Led high power usage normal?

Using Cyanogenmod7 nightly build from 2 weeks ago. Had 60% battery before I turned on the flash led with the built in Torch app, not the superbright setting, just normal lighting.
I had it on for less than 30 minutes, and the battery was drained all the way down to 0.
Is this normal?
Could be. Using the LED for an large amount of time, 30 mins or more, can damage the phone. The LED can get hot as well so I would say yes, it is normal it drains the battery. I maybe wrong.
The Flash/LED drains excessive power from the battery, thus decreasing the battery voltage drastically. The battery Gauge on the Li-ion batteries works by the voltage of the battery, so the sudden drop in voltage indicates that the battery is draining fast. But after the phone shutting down the voltage may have settled down and probably there is some juice left in the battery.
In other words this seems normal and is a drawback of the Li-ion batteries as I know. I personally dont recommend using the LED for too long as it is not meant to be used like that. You ll probably be shortening its life.

New Battery Theory - Bad Percentage Reading

Hey all, so I have a different theory on the GNex battery issue but I'm not sure how to test it. It also might explain why there has been such a discrepancy in people's battery stats.
My theory is that there is something wrong with the way ICS/GNex is charging/reading/identifying battery information. Here are a few of the reasons why I think this is the case.
1 - My phone will occasionally charge absurdly fast, like 20 percent in 10 minutes... but then it will die equally as quick. My first thought was that the phone just charges and discharges quickly... BUT
2 - After charging for, say an hour, when I do a battery pull and let it sit for a minute or two before putting it back all of a sudden my super quick battery charge to 62% is now only at 37% (actual numbers that happened to me tonight). So why did I do a battery pull...?
3 - Because I noticed that after 10 minutes my phone had gone from 62% to 56% and I thought that was absurd. Once I did the pull and was back to my (as I like to call it) normalized battery percentage I have only dropped 15% in 2 hours and that includes heavy data usage on maps, navigation and texting. And another strange thing
4 - I have actually seen it go the other way! I once was around 30%, rebooted the phone and it jumped to 50%. Now that I'm thinking about it I often see weird fluctuations in my battery reading. One minute it will be 28%, then I turn it off and turn it back on and it will be 29%. Oh... and for those of you wondering
5 - This has happened both on a stock rom, rooted stock (although not like that would make a diff) and a custom rom ARHD. But still there is one last question...
6 - Why is there so much disparity on the issue? My theory is because this battery madness is so unpredictable you, you don't know when you get a normalized charge or an inflated charge. And lastly...
7 - I think it's gotta be a SW issue, why else would Nexus S owners be seeing the issue as well? (So that's good news... hopefully).
Soooo, that's my little rant. I think part of the problem is people are getting distracted by all these other theories with kernel drivers and etc because of the absurdly high Android OS issue (although in all fairness my theory could be more misdirection).
So why post? Well if people could try their luck validating/disproving my theory I would really appreciate it!
Here's what I'd like (and what I am going to do).
Charge your battery for an hour, if it charges really fast note the percentage.
Optional: Play with the phone for a while and see if it discharges quickly.
Do a battery pull, let it sit for a sec and put it back in and note the percentage.
If the percentage is significantly lower (10+%) start using the phone now and note the time to discharge.
Thanks!
EDIT: Also a good thing to mention, I am not disagreeing about the Android OS bug - I think that's also very real and something I have experienced as well. BUT if you look at the other battery thread you'll see a lot of people posting battery success images with high Android OS utilization. I think it could be an indication of multiple issues contributing to a negative experience.
Oh and I submitted a bug report to Google.
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=23311
I've also noticed crazy battery drop after reboots or pulling battery. Easily drops 10%+ at times. Reminds me of my great blackberries back in the day
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using xda premium
all good here. i'm very pleased with the battery life.
while there may be issues with the stats, the wake times are real for some users - as well as the heat generated (indicating the cpu is working) when the phone should be sleeping.
There is no question there are either bugs in ICS that cause wake locks to get stuck, or badly written apps that keep it awake that didn't keep awake froyo/gingerbread.
Agreed on the wake lock. In fact I really should have quantified that in my original post - I too have that ridiculous Android OS utilization.
I updated my post - you make a good point.
Charged to about 21%. Pulled battery and rebooted and reported about 31%. Running ARHD.
EDIT: Pulled battery again and rebooted and reports 20%.
I realized mine was charging extremely slow so I decided to turn it off and let it charge faster. It was only at 48% when I turned it off but as soon as the battery indicator showed up with the phone off it appeared to be well over halfway charged, I would've guessed close to 75% but I didn't think to turn it back on and see..
edit: I did charge it fully with the phone off then wiped battery stats in cwm before rebooting into the OS after this. Since then it seems to be charging normally and reporting the correct battery level
To prove this theory, I think you should check the reported voltage of the battery and compare that to the percentage meter. Most battery apps/widgets use the old Android "battery info" screen to report this data. There very well may be a problem with the GN/ICS meter, but to be sure there has to be some constant to go back to.
These batteries drop like a rock from full charge to something like 87-88%, and again from around 37-38% to zero. It's just the battery technology, perhaps exacerbated by not having enough battery stats to adjust the % meter.
As far as I know, an app/widget that reports battery voltage will do so from the information being provided by the battery circuitry itself, so it's not subjective or adjusted in any way like a meter will be, making it a far better correlation point for the discussion.
djp952 said:
To prove this theory, I think you should check the reported voltage of the battery and compare that to the percentage meter. Most battery apps/widgets use the old Android "battery info" screen to report this data. There very well may be a problem with the GN/ICS meter, but to be sure there has to be some constant to go back to.
These batteries drop like a rock from full charge to something like 87-88%, and again from around 37-38% to zero. It's just the battery technology, perhaps exacerbated by not having enough battery stats to adjust the % meter.
As far as I know, an app/widget that reports battery voltage will do so from the information being provided by the battery circuitry itself, so it's not subjective or adjusted in any way like a meter will be, making it a far better correlation point for the discussion.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I use current widget to tell me my voltage, as I don't pay attention to the meter. On a stock LTE battery, you should cap out at 4.203V
Voltage meter sounds like a reasonable way to approach the problem. I'm definitely not an expert on battery stats though - what should the voltages read? I know it caps at 4200mv, but what is the min?
Also how does mv relate to mah?
m0sim said:
Voltage meter sounds like a reasonable way to approach the problem. I'm definitely not an expert on battery stats though - what should the voltages read? I know it caps at 4200mv, but what is the min?
Also how does mv relate to mah?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
mv stands for millivolt which is a measurement of voltage. Examples you may have heard before are 9v battery, 110 volt wall outlet.
1mv = 1/1000 volt OR 1v = 1000mv, so you can see a mv is very small compared to a volt.
mAh stands for milliampere-hour and, in layman's terms, is a measurement of battery capacity, specifically how many hours a battery will last if the device it is connected to pulls a known amperage.
So, if a device pulls 500mA and the battery is rated 2000mAh, then generally the battery will last 4 hours (2000mAh/500mA). There are numerous other factors in the equation such as temperature, age of battery, etc. that can affect the battery life.

Batteries Doomed To Fail?

I've noticed that mine (and others report) their SGS3's run particularly hot. This is most likely due to the dual core processor, the processor seems to be located at the bottom right of the phone (by the back softkey) as this is where the phone is the hottest. Im in Arizona and during the summer temps outside are excessive constantly over 100F. Even when in my home all day I can rarely get my battery temp down to 85F. Li-Ion batteries have a much shorter lifespan when exposed to temps above 85 and when exposed to excessive temps are also prone to "thermal runaway" in which the cells become so hot that the battery continues to self heat until catastrophic failure in which there is so much pressure built up inside the battery that when the casing fails it essentially becomes a flamethrower. The dell laptop battery recalls were caused by this, a flame thrower in my lap doesnt sound fun but neither does one in my hand (unless im using a real one). The polymer plastic casing is a terrible heat sync (especially with a rubber case). It seems these batteries are going to need to be replaced once a year.
Looking at about a 35% loss in capacity within one year. I also experience terrible battery life, moderate use i get about 6 hours, screen eating up most of my battery and when in doors i keep the screen brightness all the way down.
Data found from multiple websites but do not have enough posts to site source:silly:
Wait.. You're complaining about your phone being 85f? Try over 100f lol mine gets to 42c.....very annoying
Sent from my SGH-T999 using xda premium
Sent from my SGH-T999 using xda premium
I got my phone there first day it came out and its rooted and overclocked and it stays around 28 C but goes up to ~40C at heavy use
Sent from my SGH-T999 using xda app-developers app
Yes, these batteries are doomed.
I have been looking into the charging PMIC and if you can tell it to stop charging at 80%, but it appears to be hard set at 4360mV where it goes into a trickle charge mode and runs the phone of the USB power.
The problem is two fold. For one thing we have a 2100mA battery, and the charger is 900mA, so a 0.5C charging is good for long term battery life, even better if you charge over USB at 500mA. But the discharge rate can be as high at 1000mA if you have all the bells and whistles on and things are hot to begin with. The typical usage with screen on is 200mA, maybe 400mA with WiFi, more with BT. But current increases greatly when both cores are over 1.5GHz.
So the problem mostly seems to be the charging is reducing capacity by people going below 10% charge (if you graph the voltage you can see the tail off below about 15%) and charging above 80%. LiIon capacity is reduced by keep over 95F and also permanently reduced by draining to low voltage levels and also charging much above 4.2V and then holding the voltage there. I noticed the capacity after two weeks was reduced by 20% already.
And no, the thermal runaway is no longer a problem and I wouldn't mention it anymore. The battery self-protects, as well as the system is being very careful monitoring the thermals. Also, the CPU is throttled above 56C ( I believe)
But, I know in the PMIC controls you can disconnect the battery and run only on AC when plugged in. This would be ideal to leave charge the battery to 80% then stop charging it, and you could leave it plugged in at work or overnight without worrying about the battery capacity.
You lost 20% capacity in 2 weeks??? Wow!
I've had mine for going on 2 months and my battery seems as strong as ever! Still able to easily get over 24 hours off a full charge and still be above 10%.
I am not trying to be argumentative here but isnt the idea that going below 15% and charging above 80% purely myth? I've seen quite a number of people posting the same info in the past but when asked for a reliable source for their information they are never able to produce one. Im pretty sure I've read articles/studies that debunked it as well. (Ill try to find them but honestly may be thinking of something else I read. Ill let you know either way if I find it)
I do know its a good idea to have the built-in function that stops it charging around 95-97%, but isn't that just to prevent overcharging?
Also I should point out that my phone does often get quite warm, even hot sometimes, but it hasn't affected my battery life in any noticeable way.
As for your 20% drop in capacity, have you flashed any roms? The latest jb leaks have big battery drain issues. Also when you flash any rom it can take a few full cycles for the system to relearn how to accurately report battery use and can often trick people into thinking the battery capacity has gone down.
Like I said, not trying to argue with you. It seems you tend do do your research on this type of stuff so im hoping you can point me to where people are getting their information.
Sent from my SGH-T999 using xda app-developers app

Categories

Resources