I am in Kyiv / we have long power cuts / request for two small improvements to Charging Control

/e/OS Smartphone Operating System Request a Feature
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I am in Kyiv, Ukraine.

There are power cuts.

When power has been hit and they’re rebuilding it, we have emergency power cuts, as is the case now - the power is out all day, about 9am-ish to about 9pm-ish.

This is the setting for my feature request, which is with regard to battery charging configuration and the quick-access tiles.

During long power cuts the laptop runs on its battery and I have a power bank, and I use the phone with internet sharing over USB cable for net access.

You run into the problem that the laptop is trying to charge the phone.

You really do not want that, because the phone has like two days plus of battery, but the laptop has about 12 hours tops.

In e/os configuration, there are a set of options under “Battery”, called “Charging Control”.

Normally, the phone will charge the battery to 100%. You can configure this, in Battery/Charging Control, so that the phone will charge itself to say only 80%. This is to extend battery life.

The key behaviour here is that if the phone has more charge than the maximum you have set, it will not charge.

I am currently using this to stop the phone from charging from the laptop.

I charge the phone to 100%, then turn on Charge Control and set the maximum charge to be 70%, and then use the phone with the laptop. The phone does not charge itself, unless its battery drops down to 70%.

This configuration option allows you to reduce the maximum battery charge to 70%, but not lower.

My first request then is this;

  1. That the maximum battery charge be reduced to say 10%. This will allow the phone to run much longer before it starts charging itself from the laptop.

My second request is this;

  1. That a quick access tile is created which shows the current status of Charging Control and allows it to be turned on/off. Where that control is in the Battery menu, I have on occasion had the phone charging from the laptop and not realized it. Being able to easily see it and turn it on/off would be an enormous help.
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I don’t think it is possible inside of the operating system but have you tried this app? It says in they notes about limiting charging to a certain percentage:

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AccA is a GUI for acc, an Android service to manage charging. Both are a bit old, and the last update of AccA was in 2021. So you may get better results with acc as it is newer?

Since your proposal is an interesting feature, you may open a GitLab feature proposal? If you have problems doing so, I can also do it.

P.s.: Glory to Ukraine

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Yes. I read about this app when I was originally looking for a solution to the problem of unwanted charging. It seems it would do the job, but it requires rooting the phone.

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Are you aware of the app Automate? They have an active forum where users share configurations. You probably need to download the app and get used to it … then, for instance, this is found in a quick search.

One might just try

:~$ adb root
adbd is already running as root
:~$ adb shell
1|ocean:/ # dumpsys battery set ac 0; dumpsys battery set usb 0;
ocean:/ #

Reboot phone back to normal or reverse the 0 → 1 restores charging. Both tested ok here.

Rooted debugging works on community builds, not on offocial ofc.

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Thank you.

In principle, I can make the feature proposal - I’m familiar with software engineering, and I found some information on how to do so, on-line.

However, in practice at the moment it seems I cannot do so, as I am unable to create an account on GitLab.

I attempt to sign up on GitLab with an email address and password, and receive this error;

===

1 error prohibited this user from being saved:

Email is not allowed for sign-up. Please use your regular email address. Check with your administrator.

===

Which is a seemingly confused and as such unhelpful error message.

So, currently, I am unable to proceed, as I cannot make an account on GitLab.

(As an aside, the new user limits on this forum seem a bit over-zealous. I posted one reply here, to the earlier message, and now I come to reply to you I must wait one hour to do so. That was yesterday - I have now come to post again.)

7

Looks like the new implementation of Getting an error message in new ID creation on /e/OS Gitlab?

  • If your email is not allowed, you can create a Murena Workspace account here and register using your Murena email.

My own opinion, this “spam prevention” ensures “known” contributors only to Gitlab.

user limits on this forum seem a bit over-zealous.

Indeed, it will diminish. Understanding Discourse Trust Levels

1 Like
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That is funny that you have internet access while having power cut. Mobile masts are extremely power hungry plus each mast require very serious server support right at mast itself. So no power backup, no generators. Realistically I have seen such live setup in era of UMTS and HSPA+ before LTE. Each carrier have had 7 feet rack full of 2U servers running at high utilisation. So I suspect power cuts hitting you are artificial and not blackouts

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Looks like the new implementation of Getting an error message in new ID creation on /e/OS Gitlab?

Thank you. This allows me now to progress with making a feature request in GitLab.

My own opinion, this “spam prevention” ensures “known” contributors only to Gitlab.

Yes. The error message did not in and of itself make sense to me, and so I did not know what had happened, and so I had no opinion about whether or not what is being done is useful.

Indeed, it will diminish. Understanding Discourse Trust Levels

Yes. But as a newbie, when I needed to post, I could not. Improvements in my future posting do not address that problem.

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That is funny that you have internet access while having power cut. Mobile masts are extremely power hungry plus each mast require very serious server support right at mast itself. So no power backup, no generators. Realistically I have seen such live setup in era of UMTS and HSPA+ before LTE. Each carrier have had 7 feet rack full of 2U servers running at high utilisation. So I suspect power cuts hitting you are artificial and not blackouts

So, we have scheduled power cuts. When it’s good, four hours a day, normal is two lots of four hours, bad is two lots of eight hours.

Right now we have emergency power cuts, which in practice means we have power overnight only - about 8pm to 8am.

Blackouts, if by that we mean uncontrolled power cuts, I would say occur only at the moment something which generates power gets hit. Everything else is a controlled outage.

The telcos have been dealing with this for some years now. They have I am sure built infrastructure for it, just as the rest of us - I’m now in a cafe, which has its own generator, recharging the laptop and having a hot chocolate.

However, two days ago, after a couple of days of emergency power cuts, dropped back from 4G to EDGE. That was a surprise. I picked up a new SIM, different provider, who are still on 4G - they presumably have better provisioning for power cuts.

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Tentos - I created a Murena account, and used that to make a GitLab account. Upon clicking the link in the account creation confirmation email from GitLab, I was taken to the GitLab login page. This was pre-filled with the Murena email address, and I entered the password. This took me to a 404.

I went back and tried logging in again, 404 again.

I then hit reload on the 404 page, and it successfully took me to my GitLab home page.

So there is no problem for me, but I wanted to let you know, as I think the 404 is probably not expected, and if I do not tell you, you can’t know about it.

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I have done so.

Could I ask you to have a quick look at it, and let me know of anything to change?

2 Likes
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For me, it looks good! However, I now realize that it may take quite some time until the feature is implemented.
As /e/OS is based on LineageOS, it may also be an option to open a feature request “upstream”, i.e., in the LineageOS backlog. (To be precise, most /e/OS ROMs are based on LineageOS - what phone do you have?)

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Fyi @aibd I had the same error message years ago already when I tried to register on gitlab with my email address, that I personally host. It looks like /e/’s gitlab is filtering email addresses with a white list of valid providers, probably to avoid spam / scrapping, but that keeps out custom email addresses, which is often the case for privacy aware people like us, so it’s a bit of a shame.

I personally have been unblocked by I don’t remember who and now have access to /e/’s gitlab, but for other users it would be nice to change that anti-spam mechanism.

15

I use the phone with internet sharing over USB cable for net access.

Do you do this as a means to conserve engery by not using WiFi tethering? Like: Would wireless internet sharing instead of USB cable based one consume (that much) more energy? Or is there any other reason why you’d want a physical connection between your phone and the computer?

It’s a shot into the dark though but it would circumvent the entire charging problem altogether. Stay safe and keep your head down out there man!

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I’ve not tried wifi tethering. I did try bluetooth. It uses up substantially more power than cable, and it is limited to about 1mb/sec. I get 50mb/sec over the cable.

Thank you.

1 Like
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I have a Fairphone 4.5.

I will look to open an upstream request, but I have very little time at the moment. I will get it done when I can. Thank you for letting me know. Most things in life are iterative :slight_smile:

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I’ve not tried wifi tethering. I did try bluetooth. It uses up substantially more power than cable, and it is limited to about 1mb/sec. I get 50mb/sec over the cable.

Gotcha! Perhaps you can give WiFi a try - I honestly don’t know if it uses much less energy but it should definetly give you more bandwidth than 1mb/s.

Pro tip: Car battery + USB connector. if you can’t just buy or order such a part: Many in-vehicle USB connectors have the voltage inverter from 12v DC vehicle grid to 5v USB built into the backside of the USB connector or the wire harness right behind it. I guess there are scrap yards somewhere around the City where you could get such a part and the battery for cheap?! Dort forget to put a 5 or 10 amp fuze into the + wire

You know… evem a small 12v vehicle battery with just 44 amp hours connected to such a 12v/5v USB converter would give you a boatload of running time for your phone at home if you can’t just buy more power banks.

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Nerver heard of such a device before!