Gigabeat F20: Battery Percentage jumps from 90% to 70%

[Job Van Dam]

I have seen this phenomenon of the battery jumping from 90% to 70% with my own eyes and after running the battery_bench plugin. I have totally emptied the battery and recharged it but the problem persists.

First I was wondering is there another way of fixing it without opening the player? I fear opening it.

Second I have a 2 year warranty on my Gigabeat with Best Buy. If you do suggest I bring it in to them to fix the battery (the screen too I suppose, minor nicks) should I leave Rockbox on there as is? Or should I bring it to them with the original Gigabeat firmware instead?
I'm basically asking would there be any issues(legal or not) having Rockbox on my DAP as opposed to the original firmware?
Also should I backup all my DAP hard drive contents onto a local computer before bringing it to them?

Thank you very much for your time.

[michael.conner]

I just got my Gigabeat yesterday.  I noticed the battery percentage doing the same thing on mine -- it went from 90% when I shut it down to 67% when I booted it back up.  It might be a software issue -- see http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=8592.0

[Mad Cow]

It's just a badly calibrated battery meter. Each player has it's own battery discharge curve, and the discharge curve isn't flat so developers need to study battery_bench tests and calibrate the meter. This usually takes a while.

Speaking of which, does anybody still need more results? I see a couple on the wiki page, but I'm not sure if that's enough.

[Job Van Dam]

Sweet! Thanks Michael. I never noticed that thread before.

Mad Cow if you're able to post battery results and they need more could you post mine? I'll e-mail or post them on some site for you.
I know I can just register on the Twiki but I don't want to just to post battery results.

Either way thanks Michael and Mad Cow.

[Mad Cow]

If you can get a dev working on the gigabeat to look at this tread then you can just post it here. I'm too lazy to register on the twiki.

[Febs]

Information like battery runtimes should be posted in the appropriate place in the wiki.  Do not "just post it here" and expect developers to waste their valuable timing scouring the forums looking for scattered information that you're too lazy to put in the right place.

[michael.conner]

It would probably be pretty useful for coders to see the battery benches, especially since there are only two different battery_bench.txt files attached to the Wiki -- a number of them refer to the same file from 20070108.

But those of us who aren't actively coding on the project are not so much users as testers.  So if something's not working right, it's incumbent upon testers to report our findings to those who can fix or track down what's wrong...

[Mad Cow]

Information like battery runtimes should be posted in the appropriate place in the wiki.  Do not "just post it here" and expect developers to waste their valuable timing scouring the forums looking for scattered information that you're too lazy to put in the right place.

I know that, that's why i said if a developer looks here, not when a developer looks here.