Espruino JavaScript
BJS2, drop in battery life since update #7267
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Posted at 2024-08-19 by @thyttan That sounds interesting - did you try going back to 2v12 to verify if it would have better battery life for you still? Maybe you even have a backup of your watch from before the storage corruption so you could get it to the exact same state as before? I think I generally get a week or a little less out of the battery with how I use it currently - latest firmware. Posted at 2024-08-19 by WizardStan I have not yet tried to downgrade yet. I want to gather more information about the experiences of others before I make the effort; it is way more than just the firmware that is different now, keep in mind: I was using 3 year old versions of the message and android apps as well, which seem to be much more difficult to downgrade than the firmware. Posted at 2024-08-19 by @thyttan
Yes this is true, but in the case you had a backup from before then the apps in that backup .zip file would be the older versions. :) Posted at 2024-08-20 by Poolitzer Not the case for me. Get my week battery life as before. Posted at 2024-08-23 by user158816 I also experience a significant drop in battery life since the firmware update (before it was over a week, now i barely get two days). I tried to downgrade the firmware, but it didn't help. Now I'm on 2v24. So I guess they are aware that there is a power draw problem, but at least for me it wasn't fixed by the 2v24 firmwareupdate. Posted at 2024-08-23 by Poolitzer As it said that is for the newest batch of bangles, it is a pin for GPS which was left floating by default and on all older ones this was interpreted as false, but on newer ones its true so GPS was on unexpectedly. This won't be the issue here. Posted at 2024-08-23 by user158816 is there any way to find out which app/function draws the most power? Posted at 2024-08-23 by Poolitzer I doubt that's possible with the firmware. Posted at 2024-08-23 by @thyttan The Power Manager app has a logging feature:
You might find something out with that :) Edit: there's also this: https://www.espruino.com/Reference#l_E_getPowerUsage Posted at 2024-08-24 by user158816 I have attached the logging of my bangle.js, but I have now Idea what I should do with those. Maybe someone can see if there is anything off. Attachments: Posted at 2024-08-27 by @gfwilliams It's interesting you're hitting issues. I didn't see any big issues, and watches that I keep mostly disconnected here with standard-ish clocks (pebblepp, twotwo, anton) still seem to last around a month. Thanks for that debugging - I do see this: So I wonder what your HRM setting are set to? One thing that did change between the KickStarter versions and now is we use the manufacturer-provided heart rate algorithm which it a lot more stable/accurate than the open source one. The poll rate for the HRM sensor may have also changed (especially if you had an early Bangle.js 2) so that could be affecting you Posted at 2024-08-27 by WizardStan Well my HRM is off. Before I upgraded it was ten minutes, but when I noticed the battery dropping so quickly after the upgrade I turned it off. LCD brightness is 0.1, timeout 5 seconds. Posted at 2024-09-03 by WizardStan So that didn't make a difference actually. v19 looked like an improvement over v24 but only because I wasn't paying attention. Took 2 days to get down to 80% and then 3 days to drop to (almost) 0. While 5 days isn't bad and I shouldn't be complaining, it's still unusual. I was getting 9-10 days on v12. See before and after images. I installed the Power Manager app, turned on logging, and let it run for about 20 hours but all I got was a massive "powermanager.log" file. How do I get the other files I see in this thread, especially the "Hardware.txt"? Attachments: Posted at 2024-09-04 by @gfwilliams @user158816 how did you get those files? So @WizardStan did you restore the JS firmware to factory defaults for that Bangle.js firmware version each time? Honestly the biggest power draw increases are likely to be from changes in the JS side of things. Posted at 2024-09-04 by WizardStan Yeah, after installing the firmware I did an "Install default apps" and "Reset settings" and then updated my LCD settings to turn the time it's on to minimal. The only extra app(s) I installed was Messages/Android. I'm going to try manually downgrading each app by going to their respective githubs and going back in the history, grabbing the source for whatever was available to v12, just to try and rule out the possibility that it could be a coincidental hardware failure. The corruption that started this whole thing could've been caused by the battery spontaneously doing something bad and maybe it really does just have half the capacity it used to. Posted at 2024-09-05 by @gfwilliams Ok, so even with factory reset you couldn't get 2v12 working? I know the watches have changed slightly over time (different barometer and HRM sensors) and I've had to add support for those over time so it's possible that if your watch was one of the newer ones, it wouldn't ever have been able to run firmwares earlier than a certain version. But if you can find a firmware+factory image that does appear to use less power right now than the current version, I can try it on a Bangle.js I have here that's cut open so I can measure power usage, and maybe I can track down the issue. Posted at 2024-09-05 by WizardStan The problem I'm having with the 2v12 is definitely app based, I assume there's some new functions in later firmware that some apps use which cause them to fail. Here's the interesting thing though. My battery was at 10% on v19 when I decided to risk downgrading to v12. When it completed (and I did a full reset of the watch) it started reporting a battery level of 45%. Is that ringing a bell? Did you change the way battery level is measured at some point? I'm going to let this keep running; if I get another four days that'll be... something. Posted at 2024-09-05 by @gfwilliams
Well, that is a point - we did change the way it was measured, yes - to make the reporting a bit more linear. Actually that does remind me, looking at your graph... How long do you leave the Bangle on charge? Because it looked like it wasn't left on very long (or that may just be because the graph was for multiple days!). One issue is that the battery percent is based on battery voltage, and when the battery is charging the voltage is higher. So the Bangle will say 100% when on charge, when actually it needs to stay showing 100% on charge for an hour or two at least for it to really be fully charged. ... so it might have just been that the Bangle battery isn't being fully charged up now? Posted at 2024-09-05 by WizardStan I usually let it charge for a few hours, yeah, even left it overnight once with the same effect, 4.5 days and it was down to 15%. I'll start making specific note of how long I leave it charging, for science. Probably just charge it overnight, just to be sure. It's funny you mention making it more linear because I remember that happening. Used to be I'd hit 20% and it'D be dead in a few hours if I didn't plug it in. I forget when or how but I distinctly remember being pleased that I didn't have to treat 20% as effectively empty anymore. So that must've been 2v12 or earlier. Certainly more than a year a go which is as far back as gadgetbtidge seems to keep a record. But you can see in the before graph I posted it's pretty linear even at 20%, with only a slight knee at 80% whereas the after (which posted before the before, alphabetical I assume) had a very distinct knee at 80%. Anywho, now that I'm functional back on 2v12 I'm going to keep running some experiments, let it run for a few days, see how long it takes to go from 45 to 15, charge it back up, see how long it lasts, then back to v24 I guess and see what happens when I let the battery level drop to zero. Probably take me a month. Posted at 2024-10-30 by WizardStan It was the messages widget. Or more specifically I guess the "Flash Icon" option. Ran 2v12 with as minimal as I could get using 3 year old apps installed from git: a watch face and Android integration (to record battery levels) and ended up with 17 days from 100% to dead. Upgraded just the firmware to 2v24 and got 16 days from 100% to dead, basically confirming that the firmware itself caused no major changes to the power consumption. Installed the message widget and suddenly it went from 100% to dead in 5 days. Disabled the flashing icon and it gave me the familiar 10 days instead. I've now uninstalled the widget, and updated the watch face, android integration, and message app. It's been 10 days and it looks like I'm going to get another 5 or 6 at this rate, same as my "minimal install" experiment. I'm just going to leave the widget uninstalled and recommend others remove it as well: I never actually relied on it for anything anyway. Posted at 2024-11-04 by @gfwilliams That's great - thanks for tracking this down, and for the update! Do you think the issue is you leave unread messages on the watch, so the widget is constantly flashing? I guess in most cases we expect that if the widget is flashing as soon as someone notices they'll view the message and so it won't use much power... But maybe it should stop flashing after a few minutes to save power? Posted at 2024-11-05 by WizardStan Yeah, I frequently leave messages unchecked so that they're still there until later when I can do something with them. At 6pm every Sunday I get a notification to put trash out, and sometime between 6pm and 6am the next morning I'll actually do it and then clear the notification. Or I'll get an email, see on my watch what it's about, and then ignore it for a few hours until I have time to actually deal with it. Frankly people that check their messages in a reasonable amount of time scare me ;) The fact that I'm apparently the first person to ever complain about this suggests it's not a big deal, so address it however you want. Turning off the flash after a minute or so kind of feels like it defeats the purpose of flashing to get attention though. I suppose this is really just a process issue and I should be deleting the notifications from my watch, without losing the reminder on my phone, but I've spent 11 years not-doing-that so am unlikely to start now. So no flashing for me. I'm just glad I figured it out and that there wasn't some weird bug in the firmware, because it actually works a lot better than the old 2v12 firmware I was using for years. Thanks for making such a good watch, by the way: I didn't think I'd ever find something to properly replace my pebble. Posted at 2024-11-05 by @thyttan There's also a setting to disable the flashing icon, 'Flash Icon', only drawing it once. Thus not taxing the battery in the same way. Posted at 2024-11-05 by WizardStan There is, and I mentioned so in my update. With the flashing I get 5 days battery life, without the flashing I get 10 days battery life, without the widget at all I get 16 days battery life. Posted at 2024-11-05 by @thyttan Ah, right. Sorry! Posted at 2024-11-06 by @gfwilliams What clock face are you using out of interest? I'm kind of surprised the flashing taxes the battery so much. Although looking at it, it's loading the icons, settings, and code off the external flash memory once a second, so it could just be that the flash memory is spending most of its time awake and so it causing a higher battery draw than normal. If it becomes an issue, probably the best bet is to make a minimal messages widget that just flashes a single icon once a second, and the whole thing could run from RAM and would probably be an awful lot better for power consumption. Posted at 2024-11-07 by WizardStan I originally tried to use the default Anton watch but had trouble getting the latest version running on 2v12 and the old version running on 2v24. Rather than fight errors I did a quick search and found Simple Clock which worked on both with no modifications. Like I said though, it's probably not a big deal, no one else complaining, I acknowledge I'm weird for not checking my messages as they come; even without the flashing, the widget never really helped me. I'd look at it and go "yup, got a message, I'll get to it eventually". Posted at 2024-12-19 by Karsten I have issues with my battery right now as well. I'm not quite sure what's causing it. The only things I changed was switching the watch face from pebble to pebble++ and adding bthome. But I uninstalled the mentioned message widget for now. We'll see. Can compare it to another watch from tuesday on. My son had a bangle as a christmas wish and of course this is granted. :) And he does not really use a phone so far. He wanted it anyways as a watch first and foremost. And if everything works well he can use it to open the door via bthome as a bt beacon for our Nuki door. It works great on my one and it was the cause for installing bthome and switching to pebble++ in the first place Posted at 2024-12-20 by @gfwilliams It's very cool to hear about BTHome being useful for you - I use it a lot here too. What kind of battery life are you getting? You could definitely compare with a new Bangle running the same apps, but before you worry about hardware I'd do a backup and then a factory reset, and see if battery life improves, just to rule out software as that's the problem 99% of times. Pebble++ shouldn't be much worse than Pebble - I use it here and get very good battery life, but you should be aware that some clockinfos can drain your battery a lot more than others... Displaying the date doesn't take any power, but if you display your altitude that's going to keep the barometer on, and same with heart rate to a certain extent, or if you have the clockinfo that displays seconds. Also recently a few people noticed that if they're receiving notifications from a phone and they leave unread messages, the messages widget flashes every second and uses a lot more power (even if you can't see it because it's hidden until you swipe in Pebble++!). Posted at 2024-12-20 by Karsten
I do use heart rate right now and I thought that this could be the culprit. There's not that much useful alternatives for the info boxes so I picked this. How bad is it? Is it holding the watch in active as well - that's what I guess.
around 60 hours right now. :/
Yeah, I read that, that's why I uninstalled the widget. :) Would like to have a nice watchface with action buttons and without battery drain. Did not find one so far. Pebble++ is the closest Posted at 2024-12-20 by @gfwilliams
Ok, that sounds about right with HRM. By default it looks like when HRM is showing, the HRM is on. When that is set, when you first display the HRM view it turns the HRM on for 1 minute, and it turns it on when you tap on the HRM clockinfo too. Otherwise HRM is only on when it's turned on for the 'health' app - probably every 10 minutes - and it just shows you the last HRM value. So with that you'll probably be back to much longer battery life.
Pebble++ should be fine drain wise - it just gives you the flexibility to put things on that drain your battery too :)
You know you can install extras with https://banglejs.com/apps/?c=clkinfo So you can have buttons for BTHome on there, sunrise/sunset, or a timer (which I often use). If there's something specific you'd like though let me know - clockinfos are often pretty simple Posted at 2024-12-22 by Karsten
Need to check this out. Perhaps I can do something myself. Want to get into it anyways.
Oh, okay. Will change the setting you are suggesting. Thanks! It was set to always of course. :D Additionally, I found another "problem" where I have no real idea when it started. It's a bit funny, because it shows I'm not looking at my bangle that often right now. This is mostly because it's fall/winter and I wear longshirts and jackets - often with handwarming extensions - so I cannot read my watch anyway. I do use Podcast Addict for listening to podcasts. It shows a notification box like spotify when running on the phone. For whatever reason this ends up on the bangle with media controls. This was not the case so far. This by itself is no problem but something is buggy here. The notification does not go away and is stuck in messages. When there's no newer notification to be shown on the watch, then the media info is shown with title scrolling left and right all the time even though I stopped listening to podcasts hours ago. Posted at 2024-12-23 by @thyttan I'll take this opportunity to plug the Podcast Addict Remote watch app! Posted at 2024-12-25 by Karsten
this was it! The battery usage is going sideways again! <3 |
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Posted at 2024-08-19 by user158789
I got my BangleJS 2 with the kickstarter, once the firmware reached v12 I stopped updating it. Why fix if it ain't broken?
And then a couple weeks ago it broke, got some kind of "storage corrupt" message and it factory reset itself. Figured I'd take this time to update everything. Firmware is now v24, all the apps are up to latest as of August 1st.
My problem is that, prior to this, when I was on v12 of the firmware, I was getting 9-10 days battery life. Since the crash and update I'm only getting 4 days. My settings are the same as far as I can tell, LCD brightness and timeout are low, single vibration with no repeat, HR monitor is off. I don't use any GPS or weather apps, it's strictly for checking messages right now.
Does this match anyone else's experience? Has battery life dropped significantly as the firmware has been updated? Or am I maybe missing something?
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