Every time I need to put my device to sleep for a few minutes, I notice that the battery gets drained to 0% really fast, not while it’s sleeping, but during play after a wake up.
On the first time it happened, I had my device fully charged, and after only a few minutes of playing I had to pause for lunch, so I put my device to sleep for 10~15 minutes, I came back and played uninterruptedly for 3 hours, then I noticed that the battery was already at “0%” after only 3 hours of play, which is weird, since I normally get from 8 to 9 hours of battery life with a full charge.
This wasn’t the only time it happened though, it happens every time I need to put my device to sleep, which is something I try to avoid doing.
Of course, usually the device isn’t fully charged when I need to put it to sleep, so if I have around 50% of battery left, I only get 1 or 2 hours of play before the battery is at 0% again.
I found this on the previous Pixie version, after updating to the last version, the problem still exists.
I tried searching for this issue on Discord and here, but found nothing, so I wonder if it’s not happening to anyone else, because It seems like an easy problem to notice.
The percentage reading on these devices is horrible. There’s a very good chance you could play on 0% for significant time. There have been previous reports of users playing for hours. This percentage was removed in future releases due to how inaccurate it was.
If I’m misreading and its the hardware itself just lasting a very short amount of time. I’d suggest looking at reseating the battery and flashing a StockOS just to confirm where the issue lies. My bets would be physical hardware.
That I know, the problem is that once it reaches 0% and I turn the device off, it won’t turn on again unless I recharge.
I still didn’t test how much time it actually lasts at 0% in this scenario, since I turn it off before it happens, so I dunno if it’s just bad percentage reading, but again, it’s still an actual problem for me because once it reaches 0% I have to recharge it or the device won’t turn on.
Anyway, as you suggested, I unplugged the battery for a while, I’ll test later if anything has changed and report back.
Edit: nothing has changed, I guess I’ll just have to avoid using the sleep function for now.
This is unlikely to be something caused by muOS or the way it handles sleep, it’s much more likely to be due to how unreliable the battery level indicator is.
I’ve seen some people charge to 100% and unplug the device while on the main menu and they can literally observe the battery percentage plummet to 85% while still just sitting on the menu. Others have been unable to make the battery percentage show 100% even after charging for a considerable amount of time.
As Kirky says, it would be likely that you’d be able to play for a considerable amount of time while the indicator shows 0%. It may be that the system just doesn’t allow booting if it detects (incorrectly) that the battery level is too low.
Basically, I would just take it with a pinch of salt.
To mitigate your issue with sleep, you can try the sleep shutdown settings so that it shuts the device down after a set amount of time (eg 5 minutes) in sleep and instantly resumes your game when you boot it up. Together with retroarch auto save and load state, as well as the blazing fast boot times of muOS, this is a great option.