how do I check what is draining my battery?


SNESFAN

Retro game fanatic
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I'm having trouble trying to track down a severe battery drain on my new pandora


I'm not seeing the 30+ hour battery life in "low power mode" or the 100+ hour in "suspend" on the new beta. I might get 12 hours max on battery doing nothing at all, tried just closing the lid, hitting the switch for suspend, nothing seems to improve it.


so is there a software way of telling what is draining the battery? No other processes are running in the background besides what's loaded at boot by default.


a side not maybe related, maybe not, this is one of the "no-wifi" pandoras bought from craig a week or two ago. The wifi actually works with the 3.2 kernel but not on the 2.6 so maybe it's related somehow?
 
Did you turn on the USB host? And you're doing these checks in the 3.2 kernel, right? The 2.6 doesn't get any of the new power saving benefits.
 
no modifications. I have to charge my battery in 2.6 because the device won't charge correctly in 3.2


unplug from wall charger, reseat the battery and default boot, uname -r gives me 3.2 kernel. Wifi off, bluetooth off, no sd in slots, nothing plugged into usb ports


EDIT: also another odd thing is I don't hear a "pop" from my audio like a lot have reported when going into standby and my audio sounds "warped" at times, it's another hard one to track down the specifics, looks like it's almost tied to sd card activity. I really hope these aren't hardware related things. Everything else is so freaking nice.
 
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No pop is good ^^.


High cpu usage drains the battery, so use the "top" command to see cpu usage per processus. Maybe you'll see something suspect ?
 
Wrong


well I'm reflashing agian fresh download, full battery, going to observe


top shows normal stuff, x, top, terminal > 3% when running


I'll update in a couple hours going to go into standby


EDIT: ~ 2hours later 8% has dropped, still same cpu usage running top... any ideas?


EDIT2: havn't solved it, but this is interesting and might explain the useage maybe?


sudo cat /proc/cpuinfo


BogoMIPS = 497.82


when I clock up to 700 i get 695.95


when I clock to anything at all below 500 I get 497.82


if I clock to 125 I get 497.82
 
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