Battery Buddy support thread

Applications
#58

I’m curious if it survives reflash.

Anyway, I was quite late with joining the 10 III party (I got it only on July 13th) so it’s been just 3 months. 42 full cycles (i.e. some 10% of typical Lithium battery life time) in 3 months doesn’t look too good IMO, as it would mean that the battery wouldn’t even last 3 years.

My BlackBerry Passport (with its smaller 3500 mAh battery) reports 225 full recharge cycles after whopping 6,5 YEARS (!!) of use (it used to be my daily driver since mid 2016 until I got the 10 III).

So seeing 42 cycles already eaten by the 10 III in merely 3 months is quite scary.

#59

I rebooted today, and both paths gave the same value.

Lithium batteries don’t last forever, that’s why the idle consumption is more important to get fixed than using BB to mitigate the symptoms…

#60

They certainly don’t. But, as the above figures show, if power consumption is properly optimized like on the BB10 Passport, its much smaller 3400 mAh battery can last nearly 7 years (and still way to go as its health status is reported as 76% and it still lasts more than 24 hours of typical use) or 2-3 years like the cycle count seems to suggest on the 10 III with SFOS onboard.

It wouldn’t be a problem is batteries remained easy to replace, but it gets a real challenge on recent phones.

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#62

Hi there,

I have strange behavior on my XA2 with Battery Buddy. I have a high CPU Load when the phone should idle around. When I plug in the USB cable the utilization drops suddenly and comes back after I disconnect the phone. Can I somehow remove the log of the App to get a better overview?

best
Maguro

#63

I have no immediate guess what causes that… I suggest you try running htop and un/plugging the charger, perhaps with roop privileges, and see what it tells you… Battery Buddy logs won’t help deducing the cause, I’m afraid.

#64

OK, thanks. FYI and OT - Here is what i found: more strange behavior :smiley:

I logged in via wifi and changed the user to root. Had a very short look on top - haven’t seen nothing suspicious and installed powertop additionally. Then I just wanted to connect the phone to the cable and the pop up menu for media transfer vs. just charging vs. developer flickered 3 or 4 times after i was able to select just charging mode. I checked top and powertop and wanted to compare for a first try what is happening when I disconnect the phone. Again, nothing what directly seems the reason for a high load. And here is whats new. After I disconnected the phone I realized that the CPU utilization stays low. So I think this flickering caused something.

I know there is a bug with voicecall ui and I realized, that this high usage on my phone somehow correlates everytime I miss a call. But this charging thing is new. :thinking:

High battery drainage Xperia 10 III
#65

Linking to a possibly related observation in a different thread:

Also, I think I saw this behaviour when chasing the “phone drains battery when in flight mode” problem (this still happens occasionally in 4.4.0.58 on Xperia X).

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#66

Bug: Xperia 10 iii
SFOS 4.4.0.72

After the charge level is reached, it stops chargig but the battery icon continues to have the lightning bolt.

Turning off the service does nothing

#67

I would be great to see the counted cycles in the app… if there were reliable…

Thanks
Happy New Year.
Looking forward to 4.5 and all three cameras enabled in the Xperia 10 iii

#68

It’s rather trivial to add the value, and it’s only as reliable as the firmware/hardware reports it. (What counts as a cycle? From 20% to 60%? Charging so that percentage increases by +50%? We can’t know.) There is some use to it still; bugger number means more wear, if nothing else.

#69

The icon behavior is controlled by the OS, and I find it logical to have the cord visible, as the charger is connected. The bolt shows always, I think.

#70

To clarify.

The charger is NOT connected and the bolt remains.

I literally walked around with the phone for a day or two, and only a reboot resolved it

#71

I do agree with you… that it´s not very clear what a cycle is…
I actually try to charge it from 30 to 75… so… i could never be considered a full cycle… or yes… Who knows !!!

Thinkpad laptops do have an battery app where you can count cycles, but i ´ve never looked into what a cycle is considered. It´s just a “funny” info.

Thanks !!

#72

One cycle is a 100% recharge, i.e. in case of a 4500 mAh battery it means feeding it with 4500 mAh. But not necessarily at once, it can be done in parts. If you recharge by 50% (2250 mAh) then it takes doing it twice for the cycle counter to increase by 1 cycle. In case of recharging by 20% (900 mAh) it takes doing it five times for the cycle counter to increase by 1, and so on. Any combinations are possible (e.g. 20% + 40% + 17% + 23%). It simply counts and remembers the mAh’s it gets from the charger and increases the cycle counter by one cycle only when that value sums up to 100% of the battery capacity. At this point it increases the cycle counter and then it starts counting mAh’s anew. It’s very simple and there’s absolutely nothing mysterious about it…

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#73

Thanks for the Explanation.
It does make sense.

#74

Works fine on Xperia 10 III, thanks.
It does not work properly on Gemini PDA, at least according to what is visible on the screen

battery-buddy-gemini
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My findings

  • current is still 0,
  • the connected charger is not signalled (“no)”,
  • temperature not displayed at all (on the home screen shows “?”),
  • state is still “charging” even if the charger is not connected,
  • charging does not stop when the set value is reached,
  • does not signal discharge below the set value.
#75

Battery Buddy stopped showing battery health on my 10 III. Now it always reports ‘Unknown’. I’m not sure when it happened, probably after the last update…

EDIT: Oops, it turns out that it wasn’t the latest version. Updating from 4.2.3-1 to 4.2.5-1 fixed it.

#76

Yeah, there were a few mistakes, so I had to make a few releases more :slight_smile:

#77

Worth considering for future versions of Battery Buddy is a different approach to battery saving that e.g. iOS uses. Battery is always charged to 100%, but the current is controlled so that charging ends at the desired time, e.g. very shortly before the user usually wakes up. The program calculates how much time is left until the desired hour and reduces the current automatically so that charging is slow enough to reach 100% only at that time. Of course, this takes monitoring the current that the device consumes in order to increase or decrease the input current so that the RESULTING current (delivered - consumed) equals what’s needed to get the required speed of charging…

Of course in iOS it is quite sophisticated, including learning of user’s habits so that it can be as automatic as possible, but I would love it even in a much simpler form, e.g. where I manually set the destination time and the program would modulate the current / charging speed so that charging reaches 100% at the chosen time (of course, within available current ranges).

This way when I wake up, or when I leave home, I would always have 100% of battery freshly charged, whereas now charging usually ends much sooner and the battery manages to discharge quite noticeably before I even touch it… I guess it would be much more useful, and much more practical when it comes to battery saving too, if such a function allowed me to finish charging as LATE as possible, as this way I would then end the day with MORE power left in the battery, quite possibly enough not to charge it until the next day. And that would be a true battery saving.

High battery drainage Xperia 10 III
#78

@direc85 I’ve just noticed that the Start button to manually start the service depends on the state of the “Start background service at startup” setting on the Settings page. If the setting to automatically start the service at boot is disabled, the “Start” button doesn’t work (even though it looks like an active button and is ‘clickable’ but it has no effect). So in order to manually start the service one has to temporarily enable that setting.

Another thing that I’ve been forgetting to report for a long time is a small glitch in Polish translation: on the main page both “State” and “Health” are translated in Polish as “Stan” (so there are two rows called “Stan”). I’d suggest to change it so that “State” is translated as “Status” and “Health” is either just “Stan” as it is now, or even better “Stan baterii”.

Zrzut_ekranu_20230422_002
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And while we’re at translation, “Maximum Charge Current” is not yet translated. Its Polish translation is: “Maksymalny prąd ładowania”. It would be also great if “Start background service at startup” could be changed (in order to avoid the “uruchom” word being repeated) from “Uruchom proces w tle podczas uruchomienia” to “Uruchom proces w tle podczas startu urządzenia”.

Thank you!

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