WP 34S and 31S bugs and fixes

[Nick]

(02-06-2017 10:41 PM)efroymson Wrote:  May I make the humble suggestion that the BATT command be altered to actually provide some useful information? As it stands, it is worse than useless. Perhaps it could check the voltage it sees on wakeup, then run a few calculations to get the processor going, and check again? If it notices a drop in voltage, it could report "Replace Batteries" even, since there is an alphanumeric display. Alternatively (additionally?) is there any way for the calculator to know if it has shut down due to a low voltage condition? I thought I saw it say "Bye" at least once when it had the weak batteries. If so, that could be checked by the BATT command, and the same message given.

Such a test would consume power and a low battery indicator is built-in (see below).

You can perform the test you're asking for by inserting the BATT command into an intensive program / loop and have it periodically (not continually so that it doesn't pause the workload) update the display with the voltage. That will output the voltage "under load".

Normally, the calculator goes into SLOW mode if the voltage gets low and display a battery icon (not sure if they're tied together). You'll notice this first during intensive calculation then the calculator will return to normal. [Advanced: You can add a check for SLOW in a battery test routine to observe the same. It's not a built-in function like BATT, you'll have to test bit 59 of STOM if you'd like to explore this behavior.]

The calculator remains stable as the batteries go weak and can run in SLOW long before shut-down, so this could just have been bad batteries -- I wouldn't be concerned with it happening again.