[UPDATED] battery draining completely even after ipod has been manually shut off

[Elbo]

Well mine didn't refuse to boot up at first. It booted up, my battery percentage said "1" then it shut off. I plugged it in and it started to charge. I figured that was drained.

[Chronon]

Okay.  So Rockbox booted up okay and reported a low battery?  That's good to know.  

You can also try an older build (maybe a week ago for starters) to see if this is a problem that cropped up recently, as it did for iambigjilm.  If that's the case then we can try to narrow down on which revision caused this behavior.

It's also possible that this is either hardware related or depends on some initializations performed by Apple code.  I know that a number of iPod users complain of faulty low battery warnings using unmodified Apple firmware also.  This could indicate faulty hardware.  I have also read reports of firmware upgrades by Apple improving this behavior -- presumably they changed something in the way they initialize the hardware at boot time.  I have no idea whether this applies to your case or not.

[iambigjilm]

iambigjilm mentioned that this only started happening a couple of days ago.

 

yes, Rockbox had been installed on mine for about a week before this started happening.  and no changes were made until after I started having the problem.

But you could always test the behavior by setting an alarm to go off in a few minutes and then shutting the player off and setting the hold switch.  I wouldn't be surprised to find that the alarm flags and boots up Rockbox.

 
I just tried this and Rockbox does in fact boot into the Apple firmware even though hold is on.  (I was under the impression that the ipod wouldn't boot up at all when in the hold position.  I assumed you had to start the boot and then switch hold on in order to boot back to the apple firmware.  Guess that shows me for assuming!)  

Now my question is why is the alarm coming on when I have it disabled?  (At least I think I have it disabled.)  I go to the alarm setting and there are 2 choices...

1. SELECT=Set
2. MENU=Cancel

I know for a fact that I clicked MENU to cancel it last night, but it still displays an alarm time.  Is that normal?

But it still seems like the idle poweroff should shut the system down again.

That's what I would think as well.  And I actually do have the idle poweroff set to 10 minutes.   Maybe I'm missing something here, but if the alarm is set to go off at say... 11PM and hold is on, it would boot into the apple firmware, correct?  Afaik, I do not have it set to repeat playback in either Rockbox or apple, so I'm confused as to why it stays on, if that is in fact what it's doing, and draining th battery.


Oh, and I did upgrade to build r15392-071101, so the problem has happened to me with 2 separate builds.
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update

I have confirmed that the reason for my constant low battery was in fact due to the wake-up alarm being set, or at least that's what I'm going with.  Since determining that as being the culprit, I have changed the wake-up alarm to go off during the day (if it decides it wants to go off again) so I will be near it to switch it back off, and have had zero problems losing battery power.

I would like to thank BigBambi and Chronon for their help.  I feel a little embarrassed that that was what was causing the problem (since I thought I had checked it), but I still don't understand why Rockbox would still boot up even in hold mode.  That and the fact that it went off once (and only once) when I had disabled the alarm.  No matter, it is now working properly and I am a happy Rockbox user, again!

update #2
It seems I spoke too soon.  I checked the battery life just before posting that first update and it showed 95%.  I manually shut it down and set it aside until I got a break from work to crank some tunes.  Unfortunately the battery has since completely drained. (What?!?! How?!?!)  I have no idea.  Of course it's completely dead, so I cannot check any of the settings, but I know for a fact that the alarm was not set for this early in the morning, so I'm pretty positive that's not the problem.  Oh well, back to square one.  

[punchcutter]

I just wanted to report my experience, and maybe bump this thread back up to the top    This is about my 4G greyscale, just as for OP.

I have been having this same problem. I never knew about the alarm thing... I haven't had a chance to check that and test again (will do).  I've never set the alarm, so I don't know why that would be happening.

My RB firmware is from probably about a month ago, and my vague memory is that this didn't start happening right away, but it took a couple weeks.  My symptoms: I shut the thing down - even make sure to see the little "Shutting down" splash message.  Put it aside for a long time, and when I try to reawaken, I get a low battery icon for an instant, and then blankness.  If I plug it back in, I still don't get any feedback on the screen, but after a while of being plugged in, I can finally revive it by pressing the reboot sequence over and over, and randomly banging on other buttons.  By doing the reboot over and over with the two thumbs, it almost feels like I'm giving it CPR

I had intended to post here saying I'm giving up on RB because the power management is just not ready for normal use, but now I see this may just be a bug introduced recently.  I will check my alarm and do one more test with the current version I'm running, then try upgrading to a daily build and see how it compares.
It worries me a bit to keep doing this, because I think someday the CPR will stop working and it just won't wake up again.

Dave

[iambigjilm]

yes, check your alarm.  i did not set mine in the beginning either, but it seems that that was the culprit.  since my last update i have concluded that as long as i do not switch hold on i'm fine.  for some reason i only lose power when hold is on.  i don't know why, but that's what is working for me now.  

i used hold in the past to make sure that it wouldn't turn on if something hit it in my backpack, but now i retain pretty much all battery power when leaving hold off at all times.

[punchcutter]

yes, check your alarm.  i did not set mine in the beginning either, but it seems that that was the culprit.

Well, I turned my alarm off (explicitly), and things have been going better.  Now I don't lose power all the time, but it still happens once in a while (like this morning).

In all this time, I've never actually noticed the 'pod powering itself on unexpectedly.  You'd think out of the many times this has happened I would have seen the screen come on (or being on after I had shutdown) at least once.  I'm a bit skeptical about the alarm diagnosis, but it's true that after turning the alarm off the power loss problem did seem to get better.

since my last update i have concluded that as long as i do not switch hold on i'm fine.  for some reason i only lose power when hold is on.

This is irrelevant for me, since I never use hold. I have a rubber case with a "trapdoor" cover over the click wheel, so I never need hold.  And yet I'm having the power problem.  And no (for those who might say 'aha' , I'm certain it's not that the click wheel is being pressed through the cover.  After all this time I've never seen that happen once, in either Apple firmware or RB.

Dave

[iambigjilm]

oh well.  i thought what had helped me may help you.

and unfortunately, i've been having the problem again recently.  i charged my ipod tuesday night, but didn't get a chance to listen to it at work on wednesday.  i didn't really think anything about it, but when i attempted to turn it on thursday morning at work it was completely dead.

it was fully charged tuesday night/wednesday morning, hold was off, alarm was off, and i didn't turn it on once, yet it was completely dead thursday morning?  i love the fact that i can play my flac files on it, but i think i may just uninstall it and start converting some flac to apple lossless in order to listen on the ipod until the battery problem gets fixed or when rockbox uses less battery power.

oh, and on a full battery i can usually only get about an hour and a half, which unfortunately doesn't usually even last as long as some of the live concerts i listen to.  

[oggb4mp3]

I am going to jump in here just to say that something is going on since a few weeks ago.  Somewhere in early November, I upgraded my rockbox on a ipod video 80GB and weird stuff started happeneing with the power.  I would find the battery completely drained coming out of the case, and now it won't charge.  I just left it hooked up to the charger all night, and it is almost as if rockbox thinks it is fully charged even though it isn't.

Prior to the upgrade I made in early November (somewhere around the 5th or 6th), I was running a rockbox from earley Octboer and everything worked fine.

I've been playing around trying to get it it to boot into the original firmware to try and get a charge on it, but I keep getting the extremely low battery warning for a few minutes, then it will try to reboot and go back into the low battery warning.

Also, if this is helpful, before the battery fully drained last night, I upgraded to the current build of around midnight EST.  Now, I can't even get into disk mode to try downgrading to an older tarball.

(Soap merged two posts.  Do Not Double Post in the future!)

SO I plugged it into my dock/charger and got it to boot into the Apple firmware, which is reporting the thing is fully charged even though it isn't.  Is this a known issue with Apple firmware?  Google hasn't turned up anything for me yet.

[punchcutter]

Just thought I'd follow up this thread again..... I've been continuing to test.  I am still occasionally having the "battery drain" symptom, although as I think someone above noted, it is a "fake" symptom.  I can in fact reboot the 'pod and have it work, with the battery showing roughly (I think) the charge it had when I shut it down.  So somewhere there is a signal being sent that the battery is dead even though it's not. I'm quite sure, however, that when this first started happening to me, a simple reboot did not work to fix it (on the other hand, that was probably an earlier software version).

I have been trying to find a pattern in order to clarify this problem, but have not been able to find one.  The best I can say is that the likelihood of the fake battery drain syndrome seems to increase the longer I leave the machine without starting it.  It does not seem to be related to the amount of charge in the battery. Still, there's nothing reproducible yet.

I would love to work closely with a 4G developer to isolate this bug and put it to rest once and for all.  I'm good at doing careful testing  Please contact me if you're such a developer...

Dave

[tekrotzen]

Just to confirm that I'm having the same issues with my 4g 40go ipod.
I've not been able to understand when exactly it was happening, but once I see the "no battery" icon during boot process, my ipod shuts down and refuse to do anything else (blank screen, no reaction) until I plug it in again.

Actually, the only real workaround I found is not leaving my flat without charger and cable!

I'll get back to you if I'm able to get some more info...

And thanks for Rockbox: it's so good I'm still using it even if I have this problem since a month or so, when I first installed it!

[punchcutter]

tekrotzen, if you are running a build that's more than one month old, you really should upgrade to a recent one.  The one I'm running now is about a week old (071207).  I can reboot the machine and have it work as normal after one of these "incidents" (and without plugging in).  I'd be curious to know if you have the same experience after upgrading.

Dave

[Kamui]

OOO My ipod 3.5g 30GB loaded with the 3.4 rockbox has the same issue. I turn it of from the play/pause button and the other day the battery is depleted. What is happening?!?!

[saratoga]

Lithium ion batteries discharge slowly even when they are not being used.