Battery life

[akaTB]

battery died without using the Dm42 in 13 days..... Aargghgggg!

If you are on the 3.10 / 3.10 firmware... welcome to the club!

[groenewe]

Can not even switch on the check the FW now... So need 1. a new battery, 2. connect it to USB, 3. check FW and then the upgrade process. Something is strange since I did not have this for months and now "suddenly" it eats CR2032 as if it is nothing.

[rprosperi]

Can not even switch on the check the FW now... So need 1. a new battery, 2. connect it to USB, 3. check FW and then the upgrade process. Something is strange since I did not have this for months and now "suddenly" it eats CR2032 as if it is nothing.

It should run off USB power, even with dead battery, which should let you verify FW version at least.

Could it be simply a bad battery? has it killed more than 1 totally new battery?

[groenewe]

I have FW version v3.0 ... moreover and importantly I do not have the option to
flashing process later using "Flash firmware from FAT" either from DM42 program "SETUP → System" or directly from DMCP System menu "Enter System Menu"

so what to do... should I apply the old update process still now? Appreciate your tips as I'm really running out of CR2032 batteries.

[grsbanks]

Yes, if you're running a version earlier than 3.5 then you have to update using the legacy method. Only versions 3.5 and later give you the possibility of flashing a .bin file residing on the FAT drive.

[groenewe]

SOLVED.... pfew.... what a process..... What I now notice is that the date formatting is gone... (lost?) I got the normal formatting back by applying my own calculator state... I guess the menu and settings have changed a lot since last time. Is this now the fix for the battery issue?

[groenewe]

BATTERY: was nicely on 3.00V during update process etc. Now every 5 minutes going down with 0.01V. Doing nothing. Just switching on and off. No calculation nothing. I guess this is not good. I will buy new different branded batteries, though this is a reputable brand, but assume something is wrong. Right?

I now read one of the posts more correctly. I've upgrade to the latest firmware assuming that this would fix the battery consumption issue. So apparently it does not. I'm on DMCP v3.10 (IFC 03.09)

[grsbanks]

There are a few units out in the wild that the fix didn't.. well... fix.

I would advise you to get in touch with michael@swissmicros.com for what to do next.

[akaTB]

There are a few units out in the wild that the fix didn't.. well... fix.

In our units there was nothing to fix, and the "fix" actually disrupted them.

I would advise you to get in touch with michael@swissmicros.com for what to do next.

I did, but after an initial ACK with his generic advice to update to the latest firmware (what? that's what was causing the problem) I heard nothing more.
It was only thanks to this forum (and yourself, of course) that I knew that there were others with my same problem (that didn't exist in the first place).

I understand that a fix for a faulty (?) library implementation needs to be published but this is an earlier problem that needs to be fixed for everybody: those who had the problem before and those that have the problem now.

[fkunz]

Hello,

Is this problem fixed?

I'm asking because I received a new DM42 (serno 4064) shortly and it drains the battery in less than a week . I measured the current consumption and this is ~0,5mA in on (idle) as well as in off state. The software is

DCMP v3.13, IFC 03.10

and from the release notes I haven't found any hints to battery life fixes in the latest releases. I tried also v3.12 and v3.11. All of those three show the same problem.

Not sure if that is just a problem of my device, I contacted michael@swissmicros.com a week ago, no response yet, or if that is a general issue.

Does anybody else still have this problem?

Br,
Frank