Date: Tue, 10 May 2011 22:58:32 +0200
From: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
To: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@hmh.eng.br>
Cc: Andrew Lutomirski <luto@mit.edu>, Anton Vorontsov <cbou@mail.ru>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, platform-driver-x86@vger.kernel.org,
        ibm-acpi-devel@lists.sourceforge.net,
        David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
Subject: Re: [ibm-acpi-devel] [RFC] Controlling the ThinkPad battery charger
Message-ID: <20110510205832.GC7485@elf.ucw.cz>
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Hi!

> > Hmm, I jave a battery pack with reasonably good cells, but firmware killed
> > it. IOW available for testing.
> 
> That is likely a problem with the battery pack uC, we cannot override that
> using any know firmware path in the ThinkPad.
> 
> Does the thinkpad recognizes the presence of the battery pack?  If it
> doesn't, the pack uC is probably dead or in safe mode, and you'd need to
> hardware-hack it.

Yes, it does, and it reports everything ok... (Battery 100% full
IIRC). Its just that machine dies immediately when AC is removed.

> > (And who know, perhaps recalibrate command would bring it back to life?)
> 
> AFAIK, the recalibrate command really just does this:
> 
> 1. sets 'force discharge' flag on EC so that it starts discharging the
>    battery pack.  Discharging stops when cell voltage drops close to the
>    minimum safety level.
> 
> 2. sets stop threshold to 0 (100%) for that battery pack.
> 
> That way, the box will fully-drain the pack, and then charge it to full. At
> that point, the recalibration is complete (the battery pack uC will
> auto-calibrate itself when it notices it has hit the fully-drained and
> fully-charged points).
> 
> You can monitor per-cell-group voltages through tp_smapi on a original IBM
> battery pack, that functionality should still be around on the Lenovos.
> Since this is not standard SBS functionality, it might not work on
> non-original battery packs.

IIRC I tried playing with tp_smapi and did not get anything
useful. The pack should be original, and I guess I should try again.
									Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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