Continuing the discussion from Trying to see if now is the time:
I’m just curious how that works with battery charge calibration? Because when I start switching batteries it starts messing with my calibration and drops my charge from 50% to 0% in seconds.
I have my suspicions that it confuses the Librem 5 but I don’t have hard evidence of that.
I have not personally experienced this issue much at all. Actually right now I just did the battery switch-out again at the time of writing. My last battery switch-out was approximately 7.5 hours ago. At the time it told me that I had ~95% charge after the new battery was inserted, up from the previous report of about 17% or something like that, because it got low.
But right now at that 7.5 hour mark, I was not at 0% but rather at maybe 32% or so. If possible I like to switch at or below 40% because I read a few years ago that the healthiest percentage for battery longevity is the 40%-80% range.
But I definitely have had moments where I’m seeing it report 45% battery and then I reboot and now it tells me 62% or something. I have not taken any software steps to perfect the calibration. The little wall chargers I use with these batteries have their own percent display and it doesn’t match the numbers reported by the Librem 5. They report 0 to 4 bars where each bar claims to be 25% of the battery. It seems that if I take a battery off of a charger when it shows 2 / 4 bars, despite that theoretically meaning 50% according to the wall charger, the Librem 5 often reports 75%-85% from 2 bars.
But occasionally I forget to take the batteries off the chargers until they have 4 bars. It keeps going up. Usually lately I was trying to consistently take them off at 3 / 4. That usually reports 95-99% on the Librem 5 anyway.
I don’t have suspend enabled because I like for my device to be able to wake me as a morning alarm, but even at idle to make it through the night I usually do a battery swap before sleeping. So it might be claiming ~70% when I shut my eyes but usually as long as it’s above about 35% or so, I’d say that it’s likely to last all night and wake me in the morning as expected.
So, I’m not doing anything really special to ensure totally accurate calibration, but I do not often see sudden downward spikes in battery percentage. That could have a lot of factors, though. I got my first battery in April, then two more probably in May or June and a fourth one I think in maybe September. The manufacture dates listed physically on the batteries range from 2021 to 2022 despite me receiving everything in 2023, as I recall. So these are perhaps fairly new; folks having it worse than I do might easily have older hardware/batteries. I am not by any means the first to receive a Librem 5.
But it also might be that on many days, if I use my phone for light web browsing or texting or terminal apps, and only intermittently, then I am not running programs that would do a heavy battery burn. I have at times played a LibGDX knockoff of “Pacman” that I wrote a few years ago on my Librem 5. That definitely uses battery faster to do a constantly rendering OpenGL application like that, but I still haven’t really seen it jump downward in an unreasonable way. It just burned battery a little faster in order to do more.