iPod Mini 2G battery life is reeeeeally bad (only 25% of stock firmware!)

[eicca]

Normal battery life when running Apple firmware, but when playing fairly low bit rate mono-channel talk show MP3s in RockBox I'm seeing a battery loss as nasty as 20% in ten minutes.

I'm using a 256GB SD card and an iFlash adaptor, brand new battery. I've tweaked all the settings I can think of to reduce disk and screen usage.

Any pointers? Known config combinations to help out?

[saratoga]

I think with the stock hardware your device gets something like 20 hours battery life with normal files.

Maybe the modified storage has some problems? Is the device getting extremely hot while in use?

[eicca]

No temperature problems. This is my second iPod Mini I've tried in an attempt to rectify this issue.

I'm going to run a rough benchmark in stock firmware but even playing lossless in Apple FW lasts noticeably longer than playing cruddy MP3 in RockBox.

[eicca]

Stock firmware benchmark is still in progress, but it's been going for six hours now and is still showing at least 75%-ish battery. Now I know the graphical meter thingy isn't really accurate but last time I benchmarked RockBox it only went about five hours before shutting off.

[eicca]

Apple firmware resulted in 20 hours of playback.

RockBox benchmark is currently in progress, playing the same album on repeat at the same approximate volume as in the Apple firmware test. It's only been an hour and I've already lost 20%. Terrible. Database loads to RAM, doesn't auto-update, all audio enhancements are off. Backlight is off, hold switch is on. Directory Cache is off since I never use the file browser.

What debugging can I do to find out why the drain is so abysmal?

[eicca]

It's getting worse! Just sitting idle I'm watching my battery drop 1% every few minutes, backlight off!

Still no problems in the Apple firmware.

Really need some help, devs!

[roastpotatoes]

It's getting worse! Just sitting idle I'm watching my battery drop 1% every few minutes, backlight off!

Still no problems in the Apple firmware.

Really need some help, devs!

What did your battery bench end up at?
Using one of the latest dev builds I go 10 hours 31 minutes which seems to be fairly standard in comparison to these benchmarks.
https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IpodRuntime

[eicca]

Barely five hours.

Are you using a CF card? Stock microdrive?

In another thread it seems that my CF-SD adapter doesn't support ATA power management and is being kept active 100% of the time. Wondering if an actual CF card will do the trick. There's an 18-hour benchmark in the runtime wiki with a CF card back in 2009.

[speachy]

I have a patch in gerrit that should improve battery life, but it's awaiting more testing -- the last thing anyone wants to cause data corruption again.

[speachy]

I have a patch in gerrit that should improve battery life, but it's awaiting more testing -- the last thing anyone wants to cause data corruption again.

Early testing seems to indicate there's no corruption problem, so I went ahead and committed it.

So please grab the latest dev build (or 2012-03-12 or newer) and see if that brings the battery consumption back into the expected range.

[eicca]

I have a patch in gerrit that should improve battery life, but it's awaiting more testing -- the last thing anyone wants to cause data corruption again.

Early testing seems to indicate there's no corruption problem, so I went ahead and committed it.

So please grab the latest dev build (or 2012-03-12 or newer) and see if that brings the battery consumption back into the expected range.

On it! Will test and report back. Thanks for looking into this.

[roastpotatoes]

I will test this too.

[eicca]

Newest release I'm seeing in the dev builds is 3/11. How soon should the patched version show up?

EDIT: UTC time on the commits is throwing me off. What build number should I look for?

[speachy]

"dev builds" come from https://build.rockbox.org/  and are updated after every commit.

"daily builds" come from https://www.rockbox.org/daily.shtml and are generated early every morning. 

A daily build with these specific changes will happen early tomorrow morning, but it is present in the current dev builds.

[eicca]

Gotcha. So 043e8a0c5c is the version to try.