Incorrect battery (remaining) display

[jknox]

My V1 Recorder has been working fine, but has always had short "useful" battery life - sometimes returning to the music list with the battery display still showing half remaining.  Now it only gives about 5 minutes of play time before doing the same, regardless of batteries installed, and with the batteries fully charged externally.  

The display (with full externally charged batteries) shows almost zero battery capacity.  After a few minutes it will start flipping back to the music list.  Fiddle with it for a couple more minutes and it will start doing an autoshutdown.

Faking in the batteries with a DC power supply and setting it exactly on 4.80 Vdc - the player will play fine, but show almost zero battery life remaining.  Dropping the power supply a couple of tenths will cause an autoshutdown.  At 4.8 Vdc the debug menu shows the CORRECT battery voltage (4.78 Vdc), but  it also shows:

   Charge State: 0
   Cycle Time: 7m
   Lvl @ cyc st: 0%
   P=0    I=0
   Trickle Sec: 0/60
   Last Pwr Hist:  4.76
   Batt Level:  8%
   Est Remain:  66 min

So it *looks* like it is reading okay, but thinks 4.8 volts is almost dead.  Now I assume that it is probably trying to just update/reduce the remaining power estimate by how long it has charged vs. how long it has played.  But will it shut down just a couple of tenths under that.

Software issue?  [Will it shut down if it THINKS the batteries are almost depleted, regardless of the voltage (which admittedly is a poor indication of NiMH charge)?]   Hardware issue? [A low-voltage indication from the monitor chip?]

Any ideas/suggestions?

[LinusN]

This might be a problem with your hardware. On some players, the ground connections on the PCB are bad, causing the voltage to drop when the disk spins up. This voltage drop causes the button driver to detect bogus key presses of the OFF button.

Please try the unofficial 2.5.1 patch and see if it works better for you.

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/RockBox251

[jknox]

Thanks, I'll give it a try (because right now I am getting about 5 minutes on a fresh charge of a good set of batteries).

             jmk

[Llorean]

Just out of curiosity, do you mean *actually* 5 minutes, or do you mean "A short time, and I'm exaggerating it by saying 5 minutes"?