Battery life problem... when booting up!

[DervishD]

Hi all

I have a problem with my rockboxed iAudio X5V when booting up. Sometimes, when the battery is not fully charged and I boot up the player, the battery drops to ~3.56V or less. This means that after the boot splash image and information and just before re-loading the last played file, the dreaded "Battery empty, please recharge, shutting down" message appears and the player shuts down.

If I wait a bit, or if I'm lucky enough to full boot up, the battery rises from ~3.56V to 3.80V OR EVEN MORE after a minute or so.

The problem is that the hard disk is heavily used at startup, so if the battery is not fully charged it is drained by this hard disk activity.

My question is: I have dircache on and tagcache on, and I suspect that this is the problem (the cache is being filled at boot up, so the hard disk is used heavily). Can I avoid this problem (that bites me frequently, leaving me without music if I dare to turn off the player unless the battery has enough charge) if I turn off dircache and tagcache? I can live without fast file and/or database browsing if I can turn on the player even if the battery is at 3.80V...

By the way, it's not weird for me to see something like 3.53V in the bootup information but having 3.70V or even more after booting up is complete, is this normal? Is the battery so stressed by the bootup process that the voltage can drop below the minimum?

Thanks a lot in advance
Raúl

[dreamlayers]

I've had the same problem with my Archos V2 Recorder.  It gets especially bad if the device is cold (such as being left in a car in winter).  When winter came this became really annoying and so I compiled a custom version of Rockbox without low battery shutdown.  For more info about this see this thread.

[DervishD]

I've had the same problem with my Archos V2 Recorder.  It gets especially bad if the device is cold (such as being left in a car in winter).  When winter came this became really annoying and so I compiled a custom version of Rockbox without low battery shutdown.  For more info about this see this thread.

Yep, winter is not helping much! Anyway, warming up the player (with the hands, for example) only solves the problem partially. It can make the player boot at times, but the problem happened in the summer, too (and here in Spain the summer is HOT, sometimes more than 40ºC).

Thanks for the link!

Raúl