Red charging led not working after battery was depleted


cubelindo

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Feb 14, 2010
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I found today that my Pandora had completely exhausted the battery. At the beginning I thought that it did not charge because the red "charging" led was off, but it seems that the battery % is increasing. The time the battery will last just shows zero, that is bizarre.


Is there any way of resetting that, so the red led and remaining time work again?


Thanks for your support!
 
Try unplugging it for a few seconds and plug it back in, usually does the trick. When the battery is showing zeros for how long it will last, it means it is charging. I've seen many units not always illuminate the red charging light while actually charging. Sometimes the light will go out, but the unit is still taking a charge.


Maybe Notaz or WizardStan would care to elaborate more on this.
 
My red LED never shows while charging, only the green (power) one. It only lights up when charging is 100% (or when battery charge is low).
 
I think this behaviour is related to the new kernel (since Super Zaxxon OS) - it doesn't mean your unit isn't charging. If you unplug the AC, wait a second then plug it back into the wall outlet, this sometimes makes it light as normal.


I get the same with the WiFi LED too, it doesn't always come on under the new kernel - but the WiFi is active anyway.
 
These LED quirks were reported multiple times, but I was never able to reliably reproduce them. I had seen this a few times myself, but as soon as I bring debugging tools in it all acts as expected.
 
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I use this thread to report a slightly different, but related issue. Not sure if it"s of interest.


I was charging with PSU. LED was lit. Battery charging.


Pluged in USB-OTG (or what the name of the small port is) to do networking via usb. LED was lit. Battery was charging.


At 100% I decided to unplug the PSU since I thought it"s better to not permanently charge with the PSUs higher power and that the smaller USB-power is enough for charging. And usually it is.


So I left the Pandora running (idling in non-power-safe-mode, LCD on), USB pluged in, LED lit. But after a few hours I noticed that battery-charge was down to somewhere in the 80%. So it was not charging.


I guess the swapping between the two charging-methods confuses the charge-mechanism.
 
OK when it got to 100% charge, the red led went on. Once unplugged from phe PSU battery time remaining works somehow (sometimes I have like 27 hours, and just coming from sleep mode it shows 95 hours or something like that) Now I'm at 65% and it seems to charge (with red led on), but battery time shows zero again.


Thanks for your replies!
 
It would be nice if the battery icon could indicate the time needed for a full charge.
 
I am not sure why, but I never saw this feature in any other device I have. Maybe there is a reason why it can't show an estimated chargetime.
 
EDIT: Disclaimer: I give no warranty if you modify your OS with the stuff I'm about to link to.


The battery indicator could indicate the remaining time to full when charging - as reported by the hardware... it is not exactly accurate, but whatever. I'm not sure if it once did indicate that and it was removed or whether I just added it to my battery plugin, but I do have a source for a version of the panel plugin that does indicate time-to-full with a patch also included... I dont know why would I have included the patch if I didnt download it from somewhere. Maybe I tried to push the change upstream, but I recall somebody saying that remaining time to full is not shown because it would confuse people ("OMG it shows a decreasing time when I'm charging"...) The source package: http://urjaman.dyndn...urjaman.tar.bz2 - it is built also (== a dirty package), so you can rm (or mv away as to backup) the old from /usr/libexec/xfce4/panel-plugins and place the one in that package (panel-plugin/xfce4-battery-plugin) there instead and reboot.
 
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