Battery Draining Extremely Fast

[augustotx]

Verification

• I searched for similar issues (including closed issues) and found none was relevant.

Introduce the issue

Sorry if this issue is poorly formatted. I'm currently on mobile.

I have been testing my Pinetime for two days trying to find out why this is the case, but battery life is really poor: about 3 to 4 hours in sleep mode. This is the Gadgetbridge graph from last night:

I was using my personal fork of InfiniTime with support for Portuguese accents and some tweaks to show seconds in the digital watch face when I noticed battery was draining fast, then I switched to regular 1.15 (main branch). I don't understand why such a performance nosedive happened, and I don't want to lose my watch. Feels bad, man.

I've been with the watch for about 2 or 3 years, can't quite remember. I expected the battery to worsen gradually, not like this. It was lasting 4 days or so just a week prior to this.

I tried disabling raise wrist and shake wake up methods to no avail. Disabling Bluetooth on the watch makes me not have Gadgetbridge data to show here, but it drains at about the same rate.

If I missed anything or you want to know something I'll try my best to explain it. Thank you for your time and your work on InfiniTime. I hope there's a fix for what's going on with my watch.

I don't have the option to buy a new one as I live in a country where Pine64 doesn't ship to. I got mine due to a friend going abroad.

Preferred solution

No response

Version

main on 9afc23c (July 3 2025 commit)

[mark9064]

Doesn't sound good :(
Just to confirm, this battery drain started without any changes to the software on your watch, and still happens with base 1.15

If that's the case, it's probably a hardware fault of some kind causing excessive power draw. It could also be a software issue where something is unexpectedly on, but I'd be surprised to see that persist through a reboot as the hardware is reinitialised on each boot. And even if it is an obscure software issue, it'll be impossible to debug without taking it apart and probing the power consumption of each component
TL;DR - Probably not fixable :(

Finger crossed that maybe someone else can chime in who might have experience of this issue - I've searched the past issues and couldn't find anything, but maybe I've missed one

[augustotx]

The battery drain started while I was using my fork (only minor changes to the digital watch face, small tweaks like changing some colors, etc). I then switched to 1.15, then to the regular main branch.

And yeah, it's probably not fixable. Didn't find anything else and it seems like it's the battery's fault (watch is not hot to the touch and there's no apparent lag). Does anyone know if the battery has a controller in it or something like it? Could be that, but I'm not well versed in the subject.

If any repo maintainer wants to close this if they think it's not an InfiniTime issue, feel free to do so. I'll keep it open if someone walks in.

[mark9064]

The battery is a bare cell wired straight to the main board. The battery percentage is computed by the microcontroller measuring the voltage and then guessing how much energy is left, there's no charge counter / fuel gauge chip.

So there's not really much that can go wrong there, and since it does actually die when hitting 0 it looks like the battery percentage calculation is working ok