OESF Portables Forum
General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: Mjolinor on February 06, 2006, 08:34:08 am
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Being a sad type I measured some current consumption on my 3000.
Default clock speed, PdaXrom installed, no running applications, fully charged battery.
All numbers in milli amps
Off: 35
On with backlight off: 185
On with backlight minimum: 200
On with backlight maximum: 413
THe reast are with minimum backlight.
Wifi inserted and connected to AP: 350
This one was a surprise.
The radio in the wireless takes less than the LED in the wired!!
wired optical mouse, still: 230
wired optical mouse, moving: 280
wireless optical mouse, still: 215
wireless optical mouse, moving: 225
Bluetooth class 1 USB, not connected to anything so searching I assume: 215, 250 when the LED flashes.
XMMS with Mplayer playing a 320 X 240 movie full screen
Not zoomed: 330, 500 ish when the disc is accessed.
Zoomed: 270
Conclusion
Get a wireless mouse
Backlight off and backlight on minimum doesn't have much difference
Zooming the screen saves a lot of power so do your movies at 320x240.
And as an aside one terminal running takes just under 10 ma, that was a shock as well.
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what about "VT's" with no X (X and VT's dont play nice under pdaXrom every time i have tried)
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VT being?
In my job it's a voltage transformer but I don't think that applies here
Assuming you mean video from the command line I can't get mplayer to work at the command prompt.
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I installed mplayer from the feed and was able to play 320x240 movies from the command line no problem. I just had to hit the zoom key press after the movie started.
What errors/problems are you guys having? I'll try to help.
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No problems
Just can't run mplayer from the command line without X, I'm not even sure you should be able to.
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VT = virtual terminal (ie the cntrl+alt+F1 - F8 thing)
i have had mplayer work from the commmand line and if i could play music from there as well (eg mpd) then i would not start up X for most things.
i used mplayer -vo bvdd to get it to run however it was not full screen even with -fs
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VT = virtual terminal (ie the cntrl+alt+F1 - F8 thing)
i have had mplayer work from the commmand line and if i could play music from there as well (eg mpd) then i would not start up X for most things.
i used mplayer -vo bvdd to get it to run however it was not full screen even with -fs
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ahhh... I understand, I've always called them TTY's. Since using pdaXrom I've caught myself pressing crl+alt+F# on a USB keyboard a few times. It's too bad pdaXrom doesn't have that functionality.
I too would be interested in the draw on the main TTY that you have on bootup with no X startup. Pretty low I would imagine.
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Command prompt at boot ( no X): 190
mplayer -vo bvdd "filename" from said command prompt: 260 when not accessing disc.
But as you said no zoom. It is also not possible to set or know what brightness level the backlight is so I set it on minimum then exited X.
How do I get to the virtual terminals without an external keyboard?
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Being a sad type I measured some current consumption on my 3000.
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Thanks! Very useful results. I planned to do such measurements myself, but now I don't have to.
Re the surprise with WiFi / wired: What you measure is not only the radio / LED but also the entire card. The radio must (IMO) draw much more power than an LED. So probably the wired card uses in general more power than the WiFi card, not considering radio and LED.
This could be because wireless cards are optimized for low power consumption, wired may not be, as the manufactureres assume that when you can connect LAN you can also connect AC power ;-)
daniel
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Being a sad type I measured some current consumption on my 3000.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=113834\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Thanks! Very useful results. I planned to do such measurements myself, but now I don't have to.
Re the surprise with WiFi / wired: What you measure is not only the radio / LED but also the entire card. The radio must (IMO) draw much more power than an LED. So probably the wired card uses in general more power than the WiFi card, not considering radio and LED.
This could be because wireless cards are optimized for low power consumption, wired may not be, as the manufactureres assume that when you can connect LAN you can also connect AC power ;-)
daniel
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No, the wired / wireless was only for the USB mouse. Not for LAN. I don't have a wired LAN adapter so I can't compare those.
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XMMS with Mplayer playing a 320 X 240 movie full screen
Not zoomed: 330, 500 ish when the disc is accessed.
Zoomed: 270
330- is that when a file is being played off a SD/CF card? I want to know the difference between how much power is drawn when playing a large .avi (640x480 or thereabouts divx/vxid) off a microdrive as compared to playing it off a SD or CF card.
I really can't understand how playing a movie zoomed saves energy, it makes no sense. I would've thought that scaling video would've took up a lot of extra processor cycles and hence increase power usage.
Thanks for the figures Mjolinor- very interesting!
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XMMS with Mplayer playing a 320 X 240 movie full screen
Not zoomed: 330, 500 ish when the disc is accessed.
Zoomed: 270
330- is that when a file is being played off a SD/CF card? I want to know the difference between how much power is drawn when playing a large .avi (640x480 or thereabouts divx/vxid) off a microdrive as compared to playing it off a SD or CF card.
I really can't understand how playing a movie zoomed saves energy, it makes no sense. I would've thought that scaling video would've took up a lot of extra processor cycles and hence increase power usage.
Thanks for the figures Mjolinor- very interesting!
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I just ordered a 2GB card to replace the internal drive so when it arrives I will do a comparative test, should be about a week unless I get bored and run it from a CF in the external slot but that wouldn't be a fair comparison as the SW would still be stored on the internal drive.
Interesting to notice that wwhen you go from zoomed to 640 x 480 the screen is, for a second, in four quadrants of the 320 x 240 screen. This suggests that the RAM is somehow addressed differently to give common address lines. Not sure how this may reduce power though.
The tests were with the SW and the movie stored on the internal HD.
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I presume then that when you say 'zoomed' you really mean 'run X at low-res (320x240)'- that confused me that as I thought 'zoomed' meant a 320x240 video being scaled up to play on a a 640x480 screen.
If you do decide to conduct any more tests I'd really like to know how much difference it makes playing movies off CF, SD or the microdrive. You'd presume CF and SD would consume less power as theres no motor but is there any difference in power consumption between streaming off a CF and a SD?
Thanks!
dan
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All my videos are 320 x 240. Zoomed means that once playing I press "FN AND 2" to make the screen 320 x 240 and therefore have the video filling the screen.
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Playing video from CF does not change the current consumption except that there are no peaks. Playing from the internal microdrive there are peaks of current draw around 500 ma, these do not happen when playing from CF. generally current is slightly less with a steady 290 when playing not zoomed and 240 when zoomed. This is minimum brightness and the USB wireless mouse plugged in. No other SW running other than X itself.
XMMS on it's own, not playing anything increases current draw by 50 ma or so. Maybe this is because it enables sound or special video registers or something. After 3 or 4 minutes this extra current disappears so maybe it is taking from the battery to load the ap.
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you can get the vt's to work with a bit of hackery however then you cant run X as the c3000 just hangs (hint edit initab}
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I put cacko on and was startled by the fact that the wireless usb mouse takes the same current when stationary (about 15 ma) but when moving it takes a whoopping 120ma as opposed to 25 with pdaxrom
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How did you measure the current consumption?
-albertr
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Running the Z from external power via a bench top power supply with a current meter. Making sure the battery is fullly charged. I may get fancier if I can be bothered. I would have measured it with a scope but the only reason for doing that is if you have a microdirve in and I no longer have.
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I'd be interested to know what the current was when the cpu is at 143MHz, with the bus reduced, playing MP3s with the screen off.
I'm about to go clean my bathroom, it's going to take longer than an hour. But it has to be done, my mom's coming.
Pfft ... life.