Battery is getting eaten FAST

[muyloco1]

I got my Fuze V1 yesterday and tried to install rockbox on it, but it wasn't letting me do the automatic install, so I used a video tutorial on a very easy manual install. Anyway, After it was installed it was charged at 100% and after about 4-6 hours of use it was down to 26%. It seems to deplete the least amount of battery in hold mode, which is about a percent every 5-10 minutes. It would deplete faster just listening to music and showing the nowplaying screen. It depleted the fastest while playing GBC games, about a percent every minute.

Is this rockbox, or could it be a faulty battery?

[Vague Rant]

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SansaAMS

Clipv1/c200v2/m200v4/e200v2/Fuzev1/Fuzev2: battery life is much shorter than when using the OF, except for the Fuzev2 where it is only a bit shorter. See SansaRuntime

[muyloco1]

Yea but it's about half of what it's supposed to be on rockbox. It says over 11 hours for RB. Thanks for the reply though, and I'll update later to see if I just needed to charge fully a few times.

[funman]

The batteries are not all exactly the same.

Also rockboy needs to boost the CPU for the games to be realtime so the battery will deplete much faster.

Unless specified the times given on SansaRuntime are when playing music and screen off.

[muyloco1]

Ok that makes much more sense. Thanks!

[Chronon]

The batteries are not all exactly the same.

Also rockboy needs to boost the CPU for the games to be realtime so the battery will deplete much faster.

Not to mention that the backlight will be on, which is the biggest consumer of battery.

[muyloco1]

That's what I was starting to think... Would making brightness darker and making the black light timer to about 5 seconds increase battery life?

[funman]

Yes, but it depends how much time you have the backlight active of course.

5 seconds with backlight at maximum brightness won't be much different from 5 seconds with minimum brightness or 1 minute with maximum brightness, if the player runs with the backlight off for 14 hours.

[sadzior]

let me tell you what i did to improve my fuze v1 battery life

-everytime i plug in my fuze to upload some music, i install the current release of RB (check the manual). Sometimes it improves the battery life significantly
-turn the brightness of the screen to 50% or less (the less, the better)
-turn off the crossfeed function - it barely makes a difference on regular headphones, but it eats the battery like a mad man  (at least on mine)
-delete all games so that you wont get tempted
-get some good headphones that will suppress the external sounds like traffic etc, therefore you will be able to turn the volume down and save the battery

Hope i helped

[muyloco1]

let me tell you what i did to improve my fuze v1 battery life

-everytime i plug in my fuze to upload some music, i install the current release of RB (check the manual). Sometimes it improves the battery life significantly
-turn the brightness of the screen to 50% or less (the less, the better)
-turn off the crossfeed function - it barely makes a difference on regular headphones, but it eats the battery like a mad man  (at least on mine)
-delete all games so that you wont get tempted
-get some good headphones that will suppress the external sounds like traffic etc, therefore you will be able to turn the volume down and save the battery

Hope i helped

Thanks I'm gonna do this right now!

[sadzior]

one more thing - as far as im concerned, some themes use significantly more power than others. I sugest using the most basic ones 

[muyloco1]

one more thing - as far as im concerned, some themes use significantly more power than others. I sugest using the most basic ones 

That could also be my problem...I'm using the Cabbie V3 or whatever which has a shiny nowplaying screen.

[sadzior]

let me know whether it made any difference or not 

[muyloco1]

Well that cross feed was already set to off I think. I'm keeping the backlight at 6 (50%) and I updated the firmware build. It seems like it has helped so thanks! I'm not sure if I'm going to change the theme because I just like the shininess of my current one.

Anyway thanks! And in the future hopefully it will only get better with the new builds.

[Strife89]

one more thing - as far as im concerned, some themes use significantly more power than others. I sugest using the most basic ones 

As far as I can tell, the themes that use the CPU the most (and thus use the most battery power) are the themes that change their output the most. An active WPS that changes the whole screen every few seconds is more demanding than a nearly-static one with a basic progress bar.

That said, some targets can turn off the screen entirely after (or even as) the backlight turns off. Rockbox does not refresh the screen at all until it is turned back on, minimizing power-consumption issues.

That could also be my problem...I'm using the Cabbie V3 or whatever which has a shiny nowplaying screen.

Cabbie v3 doesn't really do anything that Cabbie v2 doesn't. It mostly just changes the background a tad, and uses bigger icons and a bigger font.

However, in recent builds, large fonts (and/or using multiple non-system fonts) may cause Rockbox to access the disk more often, especially if you play any tracks with uncommon symbols in their tags. This can be a notable power-eater on devices that use hard drives, if it happens often enough.