hello team ! Some questions bellow about the brilliant smart battery we have in this device. (see MC95 settings/power applet/BatteryMgmt) 1. From Application perspective, can battery health info be retrieved ?(age indicator and age threshold, so a system could send an alert on bad conditions batteries) 2. Do we have a MSP setting plugin to manage this setting with MSP(to read age indicator) ? 3. Can the "age threshold" be set by reg key or MSP setting (done at deployment step) ? 4. how has the "400" default value for threshold been computed ? As it can be changed, what do I have to know from end user's MC95 usage to best set this value, what is max value ? 5. How is the battery age indicator incremented ? 6. What battery "good practice" may have an influence on age indicator to minimize increase ?
MC95 Smart Battery how does it work ?// Expert user has replied. |
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The battery "age indicator" can be read using the Smart Battery functions of the RCM API as described in the EMDK. Note that in the API it is referred to as Charge Cycle Count, even though that may be a misleading terminology. In fact, what it measures is the whole number of multiples of the batteries rated energy capacity have been placed into the battery. It adds up all the energy placed into the battery during charging, divides by the rated capacity, and truncates. Healthy vs. unhealthy is simply then a comparison of the computed number against a constant threshold. There is at present no supported Control Module in MSP to read Smart Battery information, although we are currently experimenting with this capability and plan to offer it in a future version of MSP. If you need this capability right away, you can get the MSP Programmer Development Kit (PDK) and develop it yourself without much difficulty. There is at present no supported Settings Object in MSP to set the Charge Cycle Count threshold to control the point at which healthy turns to unhealthy. Until there is some guidance from MCD about when that value should be set and to what, I would be leary of making it too easy to do so. Nonetheless, we will probably eventually provide a way. If you need this capability right away, you can get the MSP Programmer Development Kit (PDK) and develop it yourself without much difficulty. For the rest of the questions, you need to get answers from MCD.
The egistry setting to allow the treshold change is mentioned in the Integrator Guide
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ControlPanel\Power]“EnableCycleCntThresholdEdit”=DWORD:0After that you will be able to change the threshold value from the ControlPanle applet.To add a bit to Allan's explanation - looks like the threshold value is a number of *full* charge cycles where "full cycle" means charging from zero to the full capacity. If the battery is 1/3-charged then charging to full capacity forms 2/3 of the cycle.I believe for the old batteries we had more or less official number of 300 full cycles before it become "unhealthy" and would give just 80% of the full power. Now we've raised this to 400.