battery dying on a 5g

[joust]

i installed rockbox and now the ipod goes dead even when its turned off.

[Chronon]

Does this happen every time?

[joust]

it seems to.
I went into the settings and set the idle shutdown to 5s and set the backlight to 2sec in hopes that this would fix it.
I paused a song and I made site it said shutdown after the idle timeout.
next day. it was dead. when I plugged it into the pc it started charging with a message that the battery was extremely low. after a few min then it started up and connected to my PC.

[Chronon]

In the past there have been issues with (especially 5g) iPods waking themselves up and draining the battery (due to a bug with the alarm).  But as far as I know this was fixed a long time ago and we haven't had recent reports of such behavior.  In the absence of other users experiencing the same thing it seems we should look for a reason that's peculiar to your setup.

Does resetting your settings have any effect?  (You can save your current settings first if you don't want to lose them.)

[Llorean]

One question *might* be the original firmware version. Waking itself up would probably be associated with the flash firmware.

[joust]

are you saying its the original firmware? can that be changed?
I will uninstall rockbox and see if its doing the same thing.

i did another test last night.
it shut down with a full charge and this morning the battery was only the smallest little bit left.

edit:
hey, I just tried to run ipodpatcher and uninstall rockbox. it says it cannot find and ipod. but its runnign in ipod mode and itunes finds it.

edit#2
did it. had to reboot my PC.
i'll test now with ipod sw only and see if its simply the battery. or related to rockbox

[Llorean]

The iPod software doesn't actually shut down the iPod, normally. It just goes into a low power mode but stays on. To test it with the original firmware, you'd need to leave the iPod untouched for several days until it goes into what Apple calls "deep sleep". Even then it may not show the same behaviour.

[joust]

but as long as it keeps a charge over night with disuse, it would have performed better than rockbox
so far it seems to be i charged it fully at 4pm and it is now almost 10 still fully charged.
so what in rockbox is killing the battery? cannot rockbox use the same low power mode technique to preserve battery life?

[Llorean]

We cannot use Apple code. Do you know how to properly suspend the hardware rather than shutting it down?

Right now you're comparing Apples to Oranges. The Apple software does something we cannot do better than we do something entirely different. The Apple software also plays DRMed music better than us, right?

The most likely case is that something hardware or flash-firmware specific causes the battery to drain. It wouldn't be Rockbox's fault so much as "This would happen in the Apple firmware too, if it is allowed to finally shut down" and if this is the case, having a different OF version installed may resolve it.

[joust]

i see your point. I didn't meant to offend. If thats how you read it, I'm sorry, that was not my intent.
I merely would like to have the unit not expend its battery while turned off.
I MUCH prefer rockbox over the native apple environment.

[Llorean]

As I said, some investigation is needed as very few people have this happen, and it happens while the player is off, which basically means "Rockbox isn't running."

[saratoga]

If rockbox isn't running its probably not a rockbox problem.

[Llorean]

Well, there's the small chance Rockbox is freezing during shutdown without everything quite shut off. I don't know how you'd test this.

But it's obviously not a widespread problem, so I think it's more likely something specific to certain units, since there have been other reports. It just may not be something Rockbox can do anything about.

[saratoga]

I haven't played with the 5G, but presumably if it freezes during power off you wouldn't be able to power on again without forcing a reset, right?

[joust]

can I help?
i'm not much of a coder but I am willing.