On Fri, 16 Dec 2011, Dominic Fandrey wrote:
> It seems something broke with the battery display. Last night it
> showed 94% remaining capacity for more than 2 hours.
>
> Afterwards I docked the machine (HP6510b) and rebooted it. Since then
> more than 8 hours have passed, but it still shows 16% (the LED indicators
> state that the battery is full and no longer charging).
>
> # acpiconf -i b
> Design capacity: 4703 mAh
> Last full capacity: 4703 mAh
> Technology: secondary (rechargeable)
> Design voltage: 10800 mV
> Capacity (warn): 236 mAh
> Capacity (low): 48 mAh
> Low/warn granularity: 100 mAh
> Warn/full granularity: 100 mAh
> Model number: Primary
> Serial number: 00835 2010/01/05
> Type: LIon
> OEM info: Hewlett-Packard
> State: charging
> Remaining capacity: 16%
> Remaining time: unknown
> Present rate: 3351 mA (39585 mW)
> Present voltage: 11813 mV
At least four things can go wrong. The battery charging circuit might
be broken (my first T23 failed that way after 5 years); the battery
might just need 'conditioning' (discharged to exhaustion, beyond normal
low-battery shutdown, then fully charged - perhaps twice), to reset its
internal Coulomb Counter; the CC chip may be faulty; or the battery
itself may be failing / have failed, usually one cell first.
Is the battery hot at this stage? If that 'Present rate' is correct, a
3.35A/39.6W charge should tend to overheat the battery over time, if
charging continues beyond full capacity, which may indicate a bad cell.
11.8V seems too low for a fully-charged 10.8V nominal LIon battery. I
have several 4.0 and 4.4Ah like the below, which charge to ~12.4V, and
only get down to 11.8V while discharging, at around 85% nom. capacity.
Interesting that your LEDs display a different view; perhaps BIOS + EC
just monitors voltage and cuts charge, but then what's reporting that
fairly high charge rate? I'd expect the Embedded Controller to be doing
that .. any dmesg indications of ACPI problems talking to the EC?
The 16% is likely from the battery's onboard coulomb counter, but then
so might be the (bogus?) charge rate report. All speculative, I know ..
# acpiconf -i 0 # Thinkpad T23, 8.2-R, older but ok battery.
Design capacity: 43200 mWh
Last full capacity: 31850 mWh
Technology: secondary (rechargeable)
Design voltage: 10800 mV
Capacity (warn): 2160 mWh
Capacity (low): 432 mWh
Low/warn granularity: 1 mWh
Warn/full granularity: 1 mWh
Model number: IBM-02K7026
Serial number: 932
Type: LION
OEM info: Panasonic
State: high
Remaining capacity: 100%
Remaining time: unknown
Present rate: 0 mW
Present voltage: 12386 mV
> The chipset is Intel 82801 from the ICH8 family. I'm running
> RELENG_9/amd64.
All that said, I don't know specifically how HP do things, or what
normal full charge voltage is expected. Tried another battery?
cheers, Ian