Author Topic: Wlan And Battery Life  (Read 5589 times)

andrewmaier

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Wlan And Battery Life
« on: November 14, 2005, 05:22:28 am »
So I have a Sl-760 and a Pretec wlan card (Cacko rom). The wlan works fine (even for my WPA enabled setup at home), but the time I get out of being online appears to be very short. At max I can get something like 30 min without the battery running out. Is there any way to improve this?

Do the wlan drivers support any energy saving mode. If so how is this enabled? Bandwidth is not normally the problem. I mainly want to read my mail and surf the web, which is sufficiently fast in most cases. But the battery life is so short being online, I hardly do it without having my power adapter with me, which is a bit odd  

So what do you do to improve the battery life while being online? Do you have similar experiences?


Any  clues welcome,

Andrew

maslovsky

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #1 on: November 14, 2005, 08:24:51 am »
Most likely your battery is almost dead and you need a new replacement one. Get one at amazon for $25 while they are available...

andrewmaier

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #2 on: November 14, 2005, 06:04:20 pm »
Quote
Most likely your battery is almost dead and you need a new replacement one. Get one at amazon for $25 while they are available...
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=103613\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Unfortunately, Amazon will not ship electronics (and batteries) to Europe. Is there any kind soul that would be willing to buy a few (I am sure there would be more non-US residents interrested) and then ship them?

Still I would like to know. How much online time do you get out of a full battery?

Thanks,

Andrew

maslovsky

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #3 on: November 15, 2005, 06:05:21 am »
Quote
Still I would like to know. How much online time do you get out of a full battery?

2.5 hours on C1000 using EA-BL08 battery with WiFi online, full brightness and CPU overclocked to 620 Mhz.

3.5 hours with EA-BL11 battery undre the same conditions.
« Last Edit: November 16, 2005, 05:36:39 am by maslovsky »

speculatrix

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #4 on: November 15, 2005, 05:52:49 pm »
or use a bluetooth CF card and PAN networking, it saves quite a bit of power... you only get 300kbps, but if you're relying on say a DSL line, you're not going to notice much difference (I don't and I'm on a 512kbps ADSL line).
Gemini 4G/Wi-Fi owner, formerly zaurus C3100 and 860 owner; also owner of an HTC Doubleshot, a Zaurus-like phone.

hpgl2

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #5 on: November 28, 2005, 10:22:37 am »
I just changed from sharp rom to openzaurus and now I can set some power options with iwconfig - nice!
I've been trying
"iwconfig wlan0 power period 1000m"

helps a lot when working on the zaurus, but of course isnt so good when ssh'ing in so I do an "iwconfig power off" when at my desk and the zaurus is connected to power.

Try setting txpower as well maybe? (my card wont do it)

root% cardctl ident
Socket 0:
  product info: "WLAN", "11Mbps_PC-Card_3.0", "ISL37100P", "Eval-RevA"
  manfid: 0x000b, 0x7100
  function: 6 (network)

cheers,
hpgl2
5500, 1Gsd, orinoco

ev1l

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #6 on: November 29, 2005, 05:18:33 pm »
Quote
2.5 hours on C1000 using EA-BL08 battery with WiFi online, full brightness and CPU overclocked to 620 Mhz.

3.5 hours with EA-BL11 battery undre the same conditions.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=103748\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]
Jesus christ, what card do you use? I barely get 2 hours with the extended battery on my 860.

ThirtyOne

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #7 on: November 30, 2005, 07:49:36 am »
The brightness level you set makes a big difference.  I set mine to what can best be described as "dim" when on battery power.  I also use a socket wi-fi card which gets more life than, for example, an ambicom card I have.

speculatrix

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #8 on: November 30, 2005, 10:59:03 am »
Quote
The brightness level you set makes a big difference.  I set mine to what can best be described as "dim" when on battery power.  I also use a socket wi-fi card which gets more life than, for example, an ambicom card I have.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=105550\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

That's quite interesting, about the screen brightness, I didn't know it mattered so much.

I have both a Zonet ZCF1100 and a Socket/Symbol card (Spectrum24 chipset), and tho' it might be superior in power consumption it doesn't appear to support WPA, and its receiver is a lot less sensitive than the ZCF (prism2/3).
Gemini 4G/Wi-Fi owner, formerly zaurus C3100 and 860 owner; also owner of an HTC Doubleshot, a Zaurus-like phone.

Ragnorok

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #9 on: December 02, 2005, 11:31:52 pm »
Quote
Quote
Still I would like to know. How much online time do you get out of a full battery?

2.5 hours on C1000 using EA-BL08 battery with WiFi online, full brightness and CPU overclocked to 620 Mhz.

3.5 hours with EA-BL11 battery undre the same conditions.
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=103748\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

- EA-BL11 is what my C1k came with.  I don't think I get 3.5 hrs from it, but quite frankly I've never tested it from a full charge to red.  I'd guess 2.5 hrs, no overclocking, display next-to-dim 'cause Cacko has issues with full dim.  (shrug)
| I shed a tear for the passing of Hiroshi; he served me well
| Zaurus zealot since Nov 2002, PDA user since Oct 1991
| Replaced Z with UMID BZ February 2010

Mjolinor

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #10 on: December 03, 2005, 04:34:54 am »
As an example of just how much current a backlight draws, on an Ipaq you can interogate the battery ASIC. Below are two consecutive ASIC readouts, one with backlight, one without.

You can see how the "Active current" changes between light on and light off and the battery really does last 10 times as long wihtout the backlight.

Battery Monitor
  Voltage                        : 3740 mV
  Active current                 : -20 mA
  Accumulated current            : 1320 mAh
  Temperature                    : 25.375 deg C
Local calculations
  Local TAD                      : 264180
  Last ACR update value          : 5284
  Is learning?                   : no
  DS2760 updates                 : 138
  Full level                     : 1321 mAh
  Derated full level             : 1321 mAh
  Empty level                    : 18 mAh
  Percentage                     : 99
  Lifetime                       : 3906 min
Option jacket
          chemistry : 0x05
         percentage : 0x64 (100)
               flag : 0x11
************************************
root@h3600:/# b
Battery Monitor
  Voltage                        : 3583 mV
  Active current                 : -295 mA
  Accumulated current            : 1319 mAh
  Temperature                    : 25.625 deg C
Local calculations
  Local TAD                      : 264180
  Last ACR update value          : 5284
  Is learning?                   : no
  DS2760 updates                 : 142
  Full level                     : 1321 mAh
  Derated full level             : 1321 mAh
  Empty level                    : 18 mAh
  Percentage                     : 99
  Lifetime                       : 264 min
Option jacket
          chemistry : 0x05
         percentage : 0x64 (100)
               flag : 0x11
« Last Edit: December 03, 2005, 04:35:33 am by Mjolinor »

cht900

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Wlan And Battery Life
« Reply #11 on: January 08, 2006, 07:11:23 am »
Is there any way to active power management function on Sharp ROM? I want to use "iwconfig power" command but system shows "not implement this function"....  

Without this function , the wifi card drained battery pretty quickly. I guess I only got 2 hours also.