Battery rate on Acer TM 292

Battery rate on Acer TM 292

[Stefan Tomanek]

Hello,
I've got an Acer Travelmate 292 (It's been sold under the name Extensa 2902, but
it's essentially an TM292), and there are 3 issues with its ACPI implementation:

1) ACPI only reports 2 frequencies (600 and 1500 Mhz) for the Dothan, I already
adressed this to the cpufreq guys

2) the ac adapter does not send any events, but's that's not much trouble since
it's status is reported properly, and battery events are sent instead

3) the rate of charging or discharging is always 0, makes it hard to guess when
we are running out of power :-)

stefan@nano:~$ acpi
     Battery 1: discharging, 99%, charging at zero rate
  - will never fully charge.
stefan@nano:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state 
present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          discharging
present rate:            0 mA
remaining capacity:      3960 mAh
present voltage:         16376 mV

I disassebled the dsdt, perhaps someone experienced can take a look at it:

http://localhost.ruhr.de/~stefan/acer_tm292_dsdt.txt

Thanks in advance...



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RE: Battery rate on Acer TM 292

[Li, Shaohua]

Stefan Tomanek wrote:
>Hello,
>I've got an Acer Travelmate 292 (It's been sold under the name Extensa
2902,
>but
>it's essentially an TM292), and there are 3 issues with its ACPI
>implementation:
>
>1) ACPI only reports 2 frequencies (600 and 1500 Mhz) for the Dothan, I
>already
>adressed this to the cpufreq guys
>
>2) the ac adapter does not send any events, but's that's not much
trouble
>since
>it's status is reported properly, and battery events are sent instead
It's possibly a BIOS issue.

>
>3) the rate of charging or discharging is always 0, makes it hard to
guess
>when
>we are running out of power :-)
>
>stefan@nano:~$ acpi
>     Battery 1: discharging, 99%, charging at zero rate
>  - will never fully charge.
>stefan@nano:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
>present:                 yes
>capacity state:          ok
>charging state:          discharging
>present rate:            0 mA
>remaining capacity:      3960 mAh
>present voltage:         16376 mV
Please don't trust 'present rate'. In many systems, 'present rate' are
always 0. If you want to estimate the power of the battery, please use
remaining capacity. I'd like the user daemon use 'remaining capacity' to
calculate the rate.

Thanks,
Shaohua


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Re: Battery rate on Acer TM 292

[Stefan Seyfried]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 09:20:53AM +0800, Li, Shaohua wrote:
> >stefan@nano:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
> >present:                 yes
> >capacity state:          ok
> >charging state:          discharging
> >present rate:            0 mA
> >remaining capacity:      3960 mAh
> >present voltage:         16376 mV

> Please don't trust 'present rate'. In many systems, 'present rate' are
> always 0.

There are actually a lot of systems where 'present rate' is pretty accurate
and there is ACER where it is always 0. I am in a dispute with ACER engineers
about this right now but they don't seem to understand the problem.
Of course this is a minor problem, but it is something which is done better
by the competitors.
I wonder if you get to see a estimated battery lifetime in Windows on these
machines.

> If you want to estimate the power of the battery, please use
> remaining capacity. I'd like the user daemon use 'remaining capacity' to
> calculate the rate.

Although this is possible, it is very low priority on my todo list since
it is needed only for ACER AFAICT and you get very bogus results shortly
after restarting the userspace daemon etc.
-- 
Stefan Seyfried



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Re: Battery rate on Acer TM 292

[Stefan Tomanek]

Stefan Seyfried writes:

> There are actually a lot of systems where 'present rate' is pretty accurate
> and there is ACER where it is always 0. I am in a dispute with ACER engineers
> about this right now but they don't seem to understand the problem.

Ah, nice to hear that someone's trying to work on that issue.

> I wonder if you get to see a estimated battery lifetime in Windows on these
> machines.

I cannot help with that, since this notebook has seen windows only for a couple
of seconds before repartitioning. :-)

As you can see in the disassebld dsdt, they seem to check the os_name at some
places, I tried to set the name to various windows version, no luck so far.



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Re: Battery rate on Acer TM 292

[Simon Fowler]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1378 bytes --]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 09:20:53AM +0800, Li, Shaohua wrote:
> Please don't trust 'present rate'. In many systems, 'present rate' are
> always 0. If you want to estimate the power of the battery, please use
> remaining capacity. I'd like the user daemon use 'remaining capacity' to
> calculate the rate.
> 
If present rate is reported, it's probably best to use it - the only
other alternative, sampling the remaining capacity over time,
is very error prone. 

On my Fujitsu LifeBook p2120 present rate reliably reflects the
remaining battery life, even to the point of closely tracking
changes in power usage. 

If I sample the remaining capacity every few seconds, however, it
becomes obvious that it simply doesn't update the reported value
often enough to be of much use - the smallest change in capacity
reported is around 30mAH, which is too coarse grained to allow a
good estimate. Even with averaging over a number of samples the
present rate calculated this way jumps around too much.

Probably the best approach would be to let the user choose which
approach to use, which is what I've done with wmacpi
(http://himi.org/wmacpi). 

Simon

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Re: Battery rate on Acer TM 292

[Norbert Preining]

On Son, 12 Sep 2004, Stefan Tomanek wrote:
> 2) the ac adapter does not send any events, but's that's not much trouble since
> it's status is reported properly, and battery events are sent instead

See my description for this fix on www.logic.at/people/preining/acer/
(or on www.linux-acpi.org).
My ac adapter (TM654) is now sending ac events

> 3) the rate of charging or discharging is always 0, makes it hard to guess when
> we are running out of power :-)

Same problem here.

Best wishes

Norbert

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