Battery Test

[alexu]

Hi

sometimes I would like to test the capacity of the battery of my camera. Of course by just using the camera itself, without the need for any extra hardware. This isn't easy to do, because:
- For good results this needs a power drain that doesn't fluctuate.
- The camera must run until the battery power fails.
- There must be some log, that tells the time until power failure or otherwise we need a second camera filming the first one. ;-)
- The working mode used for measurement should not result in producing excessive heat.
- Power drain should be as high as possible to give fast results.

Maybe this can be done with the original firmware, but I do not know how. On the 500D I switched the camera to LiveView, which drained the battery in about 2 hours. Fast enough to sit nearby and watch... sigh... But it also overheated the sensor after about 1 hour. So you needed to wait some time for cooling down after automatic switch off.
On the 60D even this doesn't work anymore, as automatic power savings kicks in way to fast. To prevent this, one could switch the camera into recording mode. Using a very low framerate thanks to Magic Lantern the two hour recording would fit onto flash. But the sensor would still overheat. But maybe the time stamp of the recording shows the time, when the camera switched off. Not as good as a real log that shows the power drain with minute resolution, but better than nothing. But can I assume a constant power drain in recording mode? I didn't test yet, because of the heat and the fluctating power drain problem.

I guess there isn't a good solution without some firmware hacking and therefor I consider this a new feature. Maybe it's already hidden in the trillions of Magic Lantern features. But I didn't find anything, not in the firmware, not in the forum.

cu
John

[nanomad]

You could try the stability tests. There's an endless one that works pretty well for this kind of stuff and helps us find bugs too

[alexu]

You could try the stability tests. There's an endless one that works pretty well for this kind of stuff and helps us find bugs too

Good idea. Which test do you mean in detail? Do all tests write a log file or just crash or don't crash? Without log one would need to observe the camera all the time.

cu
John