• 3 Posts
  • 408 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Not in electronics. Wh is a pretty difficult metric in electronics design (and thus, speccing the time a battery will last).

    I have said this before because all ICs use mA as their power consumption rating because they might have a range of 1.8V-3.6V of operation or 4.5-10V or something and they consume about the same amount of current across that spectrum but vary in power. This is why low power systems often use 1.8V.

    Batteries also vary in delivered power at a constant load. They can pull 100mA continuously, but a lithium ion cell delivers 420mW first and then continually falls until it delivers only 250mW, almost half as much.

    What is easier to calculate?

    • Integrating across a variable voltage domain for the source and then subtracting each component uses variable power, then integrating each component over its voltage range. Oh and the battery capacity left in wh is also nonlinear, so when estimating state of charge, you have to balance a nonlinear source with a differently nonlinear load, integrated over time, all on a 200MHz mcu trying to do 50 other, more important things (and that’s fast)

    • battery can deliver this set current for this time, circuit pulls this amount of current, battery lasts X hours. Estimating life cheaply is just:

    “get starting SoC from memory and voltage” “measure current once” “measure current again” Current*time=mAh used. Save

    Again, not saying it is “correct”, but significantly easier on all levels.

    For the consumer. Why does it matter? There is absolutely no specs every given for actual power used. Does your phone use 1W or 5W or 100mW on average? Never given.

    Batteries are literally just “bigger = better”. Using Wh instead mAh would not change this at all. The only thing it would do is expose the 1% that try to fudge the numbers while everyone else just fudges power consumption.

    Oh you got X phone because Y phone only had a 13Wh battery instead of 18Wh. Oh too bad, phone X uses an average of 9W and only lasts for 2 hours. Phone Y used 0.5W.



  • Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about it? Especially on/e/? I think you are the first user I have seen.

    Does android auto work, connect fast, and have all of your enabled apps on it? My girlfriend’s maps app just doesn’t work in android auto sometimes and the same with Antennapod for me and we have to reconnect. That is quite an important one.

    How is battery life with screen off? On my xperia 5ii it has always been terrible with 1.5% per hour (accubattery) on WiFi or 3% per hour on 4G…

    Does your microphone work well in calls, recording, and on speaker? I have seen a ton of bug reports for that.

    Have you run into the common “terrible haptics/vibration” thing that people are saying with it barely being noticeable or not noticable in your pocket? I have heard that and that the haptics are really really bad in general.


  • I find it very confusing to get a good workflow with it + calibre.

    I sync all of my books (and use readarr for organization or occasionally grabbing books from dead authors) via syncthing. Then calibre web won’t ingest any new books I copy to the folder, so I have to go to desktop calibre to add them manually, then it will sync the database and calibre-web has a built-in task for scanning any database changes so then the book will show up.

    Seems like a clunky method and I would think I am doing it wrong, but I haven’t found a way for calibre to scan books already organized in folders in its book directory.


  • My girlfriend and I both need new phones from her failing and buggy Samsung A52 and my Xperia 5ii. We are not going Samsung anymore because they are putting unremovable Israeli spyware baked into their devices, fairphone 6 still seems very buggy and we had a friend with a fairphone 4 with 99 problems with it, and I don’t want to give google money and we want SD card slots instead of almost no memory to force cloud subscriptions.

    2027 is starting to be a big ask though.


  • Maybe not a good example because all TVs and Smart fridges run MCUs (or SBUs) that are 10x-20x more powerful than what is in any smart watch besides the apple watch (where the watch is mostly one gigantic custom IC).

    They usually run NXP I.MX Arm M7 processors at the bare bare bare minimum, much more common is an ARM A7 or higher which is a completely different world than the tiny nrf52840 with 192KB of RAM and 1MB of flash that is standard across lower-end smart watches (and doesn’t go upuch with higher end) That is why I was confused. But I guess people get down voted to hell for asking a question lol



  • Nah, it is pretty much if you didn’t buy one of 2 trendy models of the year, then nothing else has ever or will ever be supported (of course you can always write your own drivers but it is a ton of work, especially for non-coders)

    I have a thought that a lot of the enthusiasts that go through the pain and effoet of writing all of these drivers for old phones they have were usually the kind of people to buy the best/most popular device of the year


  • Times have changed. I used to be excited 10 years ago when new android versions came out with cool new features, often better performance, and a lot of gimmicks that sometimes were useful.

    Now it is: “Oh I wonder what feature they are taking away this time, what freedom they are stepping on now, what they have enshittified now, and how they are adding additional surveillance to sell to Palantir…”

    And what they advertise is literally “Location Indicator is slightly darker”. “Settings menu had very slight spacing change” and “brightness icon is mirrored”

    Somebody is getting a promotion for those extremely minor changes







  • Oh yeah I was quite annoyed with bazzite initially with embedded toolchains… The default arch distrobox also runs vscode variants horribly with tons of freezing for some reason. I had to create a new arch distrobox.

    Also Saleae Logic2 has a Fedora bug where it takes between 2 and 10 minutes just to open because of logfiles and errordumping and timeouts that is very annoying.

    Also menu shortcuts for distrobox only work like for 20% of programs (luckily code-oss is one of them)

    And don’t get me started on running a VM that can see the local network…

    After you get a setup going though, then it is breezy though.



  • And this is why I try to recommend to every single person starting their smart home to plan it so that if everything dies, their internet, their router, power gets restarted, and their HomeAssistant gets corrupted, and you die, at the same time, that everything will work exactly as expected, because with MANY smart home systems they will just stop functioning or be stuck in a bad mode until your family hires someone to fix it.

    That’s why I lean hard towards KNX