OLPC XO-1 Battery Life

I did some extremely unscientific tests of the battery life on my mass production XO with the LiFeP battery. It’s currently running build 650, the Ship.2 build for G1G1 which doesn’t include the aggressive power manager, ohm, so it doesn’t sleep when idle.

Backlight on, light usage

First I ran the XO on battery, with the backlight fully on, running Record but not doing anything particularly active. It must use some CPU, since it displays the live video in the preview window. After about an hour I switched to Browse and played with Google Maps for a while. Otherwise the laptop was idle.

After about 3:15 the battery LED turned red, warning of low battery. It died after around 3:45 (I didn’t notice the exact time it went off so that’s an estimate…)

The next test was slightly less unscientific…

Backlight off, no activity

I charged it up again (about 2 hours charging while it was off, until the battery light went green) and ran it on battery with the backlight off, idle, and pinged it with one ping (one ping only) every minute from another machine and logged when the pings stopped responding.

After just over 5:30 it died. That’s impressive, with no power management!

Once I’ve got a developer key to unlock it for unsigned builds, I’ll install a developer build with the ohm power manager and run some further tests.

Mass Production OLPC XO-1

A mass production model OLPC XO-1 laptop arrived today, for the work I’m doing on the Telepathy-based Sugar Presence Service for Collabora Ltd.

This is the same model as the Give 1 Get 1 program, so I took some photos for those who have ordered and are wondering what they’re getting – see them on Flickr.