hi Tabs, the behavious sounds exactlt like a case of trickle charge. This triggers when the batt charge is so low that we cannot charge it (or measure it). When it happens, it's ususlly because a batt has not been used for a while.
It's normal that it will trckle charge for a while, and then switch to normal charge and fill it up. If a batt does not get out of trickle charge, that prob means it's broken. In terms of getting more low level info, get your hands on a script called batman.fth (it's somewhere in the wiki ;-) ) -- it collects logs of the batt levels per cell, and you can read it/change it. hth, m On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 12:48 AM, Tabitha Roder <tabitha.ro...@gmail.com> wrote: > We plugged in an XO-1.0 with an unknown state LiFePO4 battery (may have been > fully discharged a week before, or may have been shut down properly) and the > battery LED flashed instead of coming on solid like charging normally does. > The battery information in /sys indicated low battery voltage (5.something) > but otherwise good health and charging state. We tried the battery in a > different XO-1.0 and the same behaviour resulted. We left it plugged in > overnight and it appears to have charged normally and the battery now runs > the laptop (when it was doing the flashing charge, the laptop would switch > off immediately when you unplug the charger). > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Power_management#Battery_LED indicates flashing on > charge means trickle charging. Sadly we didn't find this page when it was > happening so cannot fully confirm it was flashing orange and with the 4 > blinks, pause pattern. This page also doesn't give any clues as to why a > battery might be trickle charging. > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification#Battery suggests that the > battery has a Maxim DS2756 chip in it, but this chip only monitors one cell, > so I guess there are two such chips? The /sys interface only gives > information about the whole battery, it doesn't tell you about the state of > each cell. The specification pdf on the Hardware_specification page > describes the Embedded Controller interface to the operating system in terms > of "Battery", not "Cell" so I guess it doesn't expose each cell either? > > Is it possible to see each cell's voltage separately from within the > operating system or the open firmware? I guess if there is no other way, it > wouldn't be terribly hard to program a microcontroller to talk to the cell > monitors over the 1 wire bus. > > > Kind regards > Tabitha Roder > > _______________________________________________ > olpc-nz mailing list > olpc...@lists.laptop.org > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-nz > > -- martin.langh...@gmail.com mar...@laptop.org -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel