docs: rewrite Power & Charging for rev4 (WP1) - #577
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The manual described power and charging as a v3 PiSugar unit with a slide switch, and stated outright that there is no battery indicator, no low-battery warning, and that a flat PiFinder "simply shuts off" — all three false on rev4. Rewrites the Power & Charging section of user_guide.rst with rev4 as the default voice and v3/v2.5 differences scoped into notes: - Power button and shutdown: press to start; press and hold to reach the shutdown confirmation, second press confirms, the unit powers itself off. - Charging: the faceplate-labelled POWER and DATA ports, the CHG indicator (and an honest word about it being bright at night), ~1.5 A charge current, ~6 h from empty, and that the unit can be used while charging. - The battery indicator: a state-of-charge estimate expressed as remaining runtime, not capacity remaining; no percentage while charging; empty once the charger's ADC goes blind. - Low-battery warnings and automatic shutdown: advisories at 10% and 5%, once per discharge, re-armed by plugging in; then an orderly shutdown that exists to avoid an SD-corrupting hard cut. - Battery life: about ten hours from the 8,000 mAh cell, quoted as a measured floor under a continuously solving load rather than a typical figure. The old "four to five hours" was a v3/PiSugar number and is gone. - Running on external power and Battery safety & care: PiSugar-specific advice moved into v3-scoped notes. Also updates the Shutdown section to lead with the power button, the Quick Start's Powering / Shutting down passages, and the troubleshooting entry for "The PiFinder won't turn on". New 176 px screenshots for the battery buckets, the charging bolt, the 10% warning and the low-battery shutdown; shutdown_confirm.png re-taken at 176 px per the opportunistic-conversion rule. Docs build clean: sphinx-build -n reports zero warnings. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The "How long does the battery last?" FAQ entry carried the same three claims the plan flagged at user_guide.rst:773-776 — "four to five hours", "there's no battery gauge", and "the unit shuts off abruptly when empty" — all false on rev4. It survived the first pass because WP1's brief scoped troubleshooting.rst to the power-on symptom near the top of the page. Rewritten in the rev4-default voice: about ten hours as a measured floor, the activity-dependence point kept, and cross-references to the battery indicator and low-battery shutdown sections rather than restating them. The USB-C power-bank hot-plug tip stays. v3/v2.5's four-to-five hours, missing indicator and abrupt cutoff move into a scoped note — which also gives v3 owners back the runtime figure this pass removed elsewhere. Docs build clean: sphinx-build -n reports zero warnings. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The plan file was scaffolding for the rev4 documentation pass (PR #572). With the work packages delivered it is stale in two places — it lists an error tone that has no producer, and says the Volume setting is gated on buzzer hardware when it is not (see #580, #581) — so leaving it in the repo would be actively misleading. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
WP0 rewrote this reference's Hardware Versions entry for rev4 but left the rest of the file describing v3 as though it were current. Since this is the file every future docs agent reads before writing, it now contradicted the manual and would have actively misled the next agent — most sharply at "no on-screen battery level indicator… no auto-shutdown… will abruptly shut off… A future hardware revision will address this." That future shipped in 2.6.1. Applies the same D1 rule as the manual: rev4 is the default case, v3/v2.5 facts are kept but explicitly labelled. Sections reworked: Hardware Versions, Initial Power On, Power & Charging Details, Brightness Control, GPS Lock, Status Screen Icons, Title Bar Display, Camera Configuration & Focus, Button Mapping, SD Card Problems, Power & Battery Issues, Device Freezing, Shutdown, plus the battery, cable, weight and dimensions FAQ answers and two branches of the decision tree. Adds a Sound & Volume section, which the file lacked entirely. Facts added: power button with the ~1s hold; POWER/DATA ports and the red CHG LED; 8,000 mAh at 1.5 A, so roughly 6 hours to charge — marked as calculated rather than measured; about 10 hours runtime as a measured floor; the 10%/5% advisories and orderly shutdown; UBlox 10 at 115,200 baud; side-mounted push-to- eject SD card; unchanged cameras; AS = Analog Sky. Two traps called out explicitly for the next agent: the 8,000 mAh capacity must not bleed into how the on-screen percentage is described, since that is a runtime fraction with no fuel gauge behind it (ADR 0020); and there is no error tone, so don't list one (issue #581). The remaining unknowns are narrowed to whether the rev4 case differs further and whether a rev4 DIY build path exists, with the DIY section given a scoping header and build_guide/BOM noted as v3/v2.5 only. Sphinx is unaffected by this file; the nitpicky docs build still reports zero warnings. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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August 7, 2026 21:58
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Part of the rev4 documentation update (
rev4-docs-update-plan.md, WP1). Three sibling packages — WP2 (sound/Volume), WP3 (screen/joystick/"Which PiFinder do I have?") and WP4 (bring-up page) — are running in parallel.Why
The manual's Power & Charging material described a v3 PiSugar unit throughout, and three of its claims are false on rev4:
rev4 has all three: a title-bar indicator, advisories at 10% and 5%, and an orderly automatic shutdown. The section also described a slide switch, two ports with a "one charges, one is wired ahead of the switch" split, and a four-to-five-hour runtime — none of which carry over.
What changed
docs/source/user_guide.rstPower & Charging restructured with rev4 as the default voice and v3/v2.5 differences in scoped
.. note::blocks:user_guide:shutdown.The Shutdown section now leads with the power button, with the Quick Menu route kept below and a v3 note. Its
shutdown_confirm.pngwas re-taken at 176 px per D3 rule 3.docs/source/quick_start.rstdocs/source/troubleshooting.rstScreenshots (all 176 px → 352×352)
Captured with
pf_remote launch -fb, which runs a full simulated discharge lap, so every battery state was reachable without hardware.images/user_guide/battery_full_docs.png,battery_mid_docs.png,battery_empty_docs.png— the indicator stepping downimages/user_guide/battery_charging_docs.png— the charging boltimages/user_guide/low_battery_warning_docs.png— the 10% advisoryimages/user_guide/low_battery_shutdown_docs.png— the automatic-shutdown warningimages/quick_start/shutdown_confirm.png— re-taken at 176 px, reached by sendingPOWER_BTNPhotos Rich needs to shoot
Per plan §6, agents cannot produce these. Rather than reference paths that don't exist (which would break the clean build), the existing
.. image::directives stay in place with an rSTTODO(rich)comment above them.images/quick_start/power.jpeg, which shows the v3 slide switch and is the single most wrong image in the manual. Referenced twice —quick_start.rst"Powering the PiFinder" anduser_guide.rst"Power button and shutdown" — so one photo fixes both.user_guide.rstCharging; not currently referenced.Open items
TODO(rich)fact markers remain. Both WP1 open questions closed mid-flight: capacity 8,000 mAh and charge time about six hours. The only twoTODO(rich)comments left in the diff are the photo placeholders for #1 above.main_menu_01_docs.pngandmain_menu_marking.pngwere not re-taken, even though they appear in the Shutdown section I edited. Both are shared withquick_start.rst, which WP3 owns this pass; re-taking them here would silently change WP3's page and risk a binary conflict. They stay at 256 px for now.keyboard_pi.py:150-161only emitsPOWER_BTNafter the button has been held for more than a second, so the prose says "press and hold it for about a second" rather than a bare press. Worth a sanity check against the real board... image::forpower.jpegis still a v3 photo. Until #1 above lands, both pages show a slide switch beside prose describing a button. That is the one remaining rev4 inaccuracy in these sections and it is a photo problem, not a prose one.Verification
Baseline was zero warnings in nitpicky mode and still is. Built with the shared docs venv (the project venv lacks
sphinxcontrib-mermaid), against a clean build directory so nothing is masked by an incremental rebuild.Scope respected:
docs/source/*.rstonly; nodocs/*.mdstubs, nodocs/ax/, nodocs/adr/, nobuild_guide.rst, noBOM.rst, and none of WP2's or WP3's sections.🤖 Generated with Claude Code