Testing battery life on the Sansa

[Vortex]

Hi everyone,

I just "invented" a smart way, how to check how long the Sansa's battery can last, even though battery_bench doesn't work on the Sansa yet.

Simply play the root.m3u which you can generate by selecting "create playlist" from the Playlist Menu in the Main Menu. Make sure that you start at the first song and make sure the whole list is longer than the Sansa's battery life (in my case the whole list lasts about 3 days, so that's definitely more than the maximum battery life).

After the battery has run dry you can connect the Sansa to your PC, recharge the battery and then (hopefully) find out, at which song (i.e. at which position in the playlist) the playback stopped. Now you can calculate how long playback has been running.

[Does Rockbox save the playback position even when it is forcefully shut down because it was running out of battery? If it doesn't, then of course the trick won't work.]

I have yet to actually try it, and I know it's kind of stupid, but I can't think of a smarter way to probe the battery life without battery_bench.

[X86]

sounds like a good idea but is a little tricky   ,the sansa battery running rockbox lasts about 8 to 12 hours,I did a test but  it failed,but I managed to remember how much time I did put the sansa in a test.

[Vortex]

Allright, I performed the test overnight.

Assuming from where it stopped in the playlist, playback had been running for 16 hours and 4 minutes.

This is not bad, but keep in mind that the display was off during the whole test. In normal use the battery probably won't last as long.

[gnu]

An easy way to test your battery life is this: go to menu/system/runtime and write down how long rockbox has been running (when your battery is full, of course). Then use rockbox normally (skip tracks, browse, shut down...) until the battery is emty, and look at the runtime menu again -> you can calculate how long your battery lasted in REAL LIFE, not some test with no backlight, no browsing etc.

[Vortex]

Did anybody run such a "real life" test on the Sansa and could present some results?

Oh and one other thing: Where does rockbox save it's "current state", i.e. the current playlist, the position in the playlist, equalizer settings and things like that?

I thought that this would be stored in some configuration file in the .rockbox dir, but I couldn't find it. I had to reboot to rockbox to find out where it had stopped.

[X86]

try to see in the first .cfg found in the .rockbox dir

[Vortex]

It's not included in config.cfg (at least i don't see it). The contents of the current playlist seem to be stored in the .playlist_control file. However I can't find where the current playback position is stored.

[nls]

resume info is saved in the nvram.bin file in your rockbox directory, it is howerver (as the name implies) a binary file that is not human readable.