Hi,

A question and an observation:

The question: how long will a fully charged tux be alive (assuming you do not use the motors)

And the observation: The other day I forgot to switch off my tux (but I did shut off the PC). After a few hours I came back and heard a purring noise just like one of the motors was trying to run.

Later I had something similar happen. I was demonstrating the tux to a friend, I went to show the light sensor app, apparently the motors took too much current and I got the same behaviour.

My guess is that when the power drops tux reboots, tries to make its initial greeting but starting the motor for the flapping of the wings uses up too much power, so the power drops, it reboots etc.

This was with the 0.4 firmware and tuxsetup 1.3.13 beta.

FM

Right now the batteries completely discharge in around 10 hours as the sleep mode is still not finished. When they're flat, you have indeed resets of the MCUs and what you hear is probably the amplifier which has a pulse on it's input each time the MCU resets.

I hope the sleep will help avoid running the batteries completely flat like now.

David

Thanks for the info David.

Is this 10 hrs even if talking regularly.

Any ideas on the time it takes when the motors are being used?

When I plugged tux and asked for the battery level it told me the level was good so I was a little bit surprised to see this behaviour.

FM

It's difficult to have a good report of the battery level. The levels set in tux_driver need to be tuned. It's needed to find the real critical minimal level value for each Tuxdroid.

Each motor takes around 200mA, the battery has (ideally) 750mA/h so one motor can run continuously for about 3 hours or one hour is all 3 motors are running.