I'm not sure what's broken...

[eriqjaffe]

I have a JBR20 (v1), running CVS-061024, and I'm having some strange power problems...

1) The unit, when plugged into AC, appears to charge.   In charging mode, the battery levels creep up to 100 overnight, no problem.

2) However, during playback, the battery level will indicate 100% for hours on end - until the unit suddenly stops playing all by itself and drops me back at the main folder list.  At this point, the battery level indicator still shows 100%.  If I attempt to play anything, it will play for about 5 seconds or so, and then drop me back to the main folder list with a "Battery Charging" message that flashes by for a second or two.  When I unplug the AC, the battery level will drop down to about something between 0 - 11%.

I can charge the batteries overnight in the Jukebox, and the battery levels stay happily at 100%  until #2 occurs again.

Just for fun, I drained the batteries completely and charged them in an external charger overnight, and then had the same behavior today.

I'm thinking it's one of a few things - either the batteries are dying (which is possible, since they're getting quite old), there's something screwy with the charging circuit which is giving me a "false positive" that the batteries are charging internally, or there's some sort of oddness going on with the battery connections themselves.

The last of those scenarios is, to my thinking, not very likely, because it's not like the unit is spontaneously rebooting, or ever refuses to power up or anything.

What confuses me the most is the fact that Rockbox is so badly mis-representing the battery levels.  Is this a known situation with the daily build I'm using?

[ROG Loco]

try getting new batteries because i used to have the charger and the batteries thing before i had an ipod and the batteries didnt last me any longer then 2 months.

[eriqjaffe]

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking, too, but I want to put off picking up the batteries until after the holidays.

[eriqjaffe]

Now that I think about it, though, isn't Rockbox supposed to "trickle charge" the batteries?  So they should always be above 90% capacity.  Or does that get screwed up when the batteries can't hold much of a charge?

[eriqjaffe]

For what it's worth, I finally dragged myself into Best Buy and picked up some new 2650Mah batteries...

And the same thing is happening - so the problem is either Rockbox not trickle charging properly or something physical with the connectors...

...any assistance would be appreciated at this point.

edit:  this link on the docs page is broken.   I was able to access it through the Internet Archive, however.  Just wanted to bring that to the attention of the responsible parties.

[bascule]

edit:  this link on the docs page is broken.   I was able to access it through the Internet Archive, however.  Just wanted to bring that to the attention of the responsible parties.

It's fixed now, thanks Linus!