Low battery life

I am only getting about 3 days of battery life. The watch I am using is the lcars.
Lcars .14
Firmware 2v11

I did have the corrosion and covered the two center pads. The battery level seems to fluctuate based on the readings. Here is and example from tonight.

50%
5 minutes later 52%
2 hours later 11%
10 minutes later 8%
10 minutes later 5%
5 minutes later 11%

Not really sure what is going wrong. I occasionally get it wet washing dishes or working out, but never submerged.

Any help would be great!

There's a whole thread on this a while back, I'd have to look back to find it. About a month ago.
The battery usage as shown by % is not linear. The last 40% will shoot down in 1 day. The first 60% may take 3-20 days depending on what things you have configured.

Ok, glad to know this is expected behavior. I was a bit worried

Yes, just to add that the battery voltage is used to work out the charge level. It varies gradually with charge (until right at the end when it drops off) but also with temperature - so a cold watch will show a lower battery level than when it is warm.

There's a reason the default battery meter doesn't display a percentage - it's because it's really not that useful as far as indications go :)

Also... if you're getting really low battery life, please try with the default apps and settings.

It's very easy for certain apps/settings to drain the battery more than the defaults do.

I added only a few apps, but even with defaults I'm having the effect of a blank screen (no response). When I plug in the charging cable it says 34% (on my LCARS watchface).

Looks like the battery is lasting about 2 days max.

Any way to monitor the power utilization somehow?

Have you got heart rate monitor set in the recorder. It takes a lot of power.

As the HRM only works properly when stationery I don't bother with it and set it to off.

Sounds like you have more than 1 issue. You should not be getting a blank screen. Try simplest clock for a day or so, as it's minimal and does not get changed often.

Ah. I think I did load the heart monitor, which I really don't need.
I'll try the simple clock and see what happens.

I'll try the simple clock and see what happens.

LCARS does display a lot of different info - I haven't tried it for any length of time but it wouldn't be a huge surprise to me if it drained the battery quick.

• Most apps don't affect battery life as they're usually not running unless explicitly loaded
  
• Widgets do affect battery life
  
• Clock faces are running all the time, so do have a big effect on battery life
  
• If you turn on the HRM in Health settings, use a really large LCD timeout, or change other settings you can hurt battery life too
  
  

Honestly, best bet is to do install default apps and leave the setting alone and see if you get a decent battery life - then work from there installing things and changing settings and see if something in particular is making it worse.

Not sure if it is practical for Bangle runtime as is, but on some watches I set the busy indicator via https://www.espruino.com/Reference#l__gl­obal_setBusyIndicator (or setSleepIndicator if pin is inverted) to something like the motor pin (D19 for Bangle 2)

Motor of course drains the battery even more but you get immediate feedback how much specifc app/action drains the battery. When it is silent it sleeps.

Hi,

if it helps - I'm using LCARS (as I developed ot^^) with different infos sich as weather info from gadgetbridge and my battery life is about 2 weeks... Could be that I have a bug in there or so but I think it should not drain the battery that fast...

David

@PeerDavid thanks! (and sorry for making out it might be LCARS :)

My point is really that it could be anything, and best way to narrow things down is to start from a completely known state.

It's also worth mentioning that it could be an idea to disable the default of 'twist to wake'. Since the LCD is always on it's not so important, but the LCD backlight draws enough power that if it were on constantly it'd flatten the battery in under 12 hours. If you're working/doing stuff in such a way that it always triggers, it can have a big effect.

I totally agree with you and it could be that there is a bug in LCARS that occurs only for some special settings or so that drains the battery - then I should better fix it otherwise other users will run into the same problem :)

@user139891 if you could send me your LCARS settings, I can try to reproduce it :)