maintenance
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You'd think you develop a good feeling for this, but it remains surprising just how little energy is needed to keep this phone running.
There are two ways you can get an intuition for the amount of energy the solar panel will generate: First there's the sky, but it has been misleading in the past. Even when it's cloudy, the rays that get through can be enough to keep the light on.
Then there's the ground and the shadows tell an interesting story: If they are dark and crisp, the sun is shining in front of a blue sky, providing ideal conditions. If they are dark and blurry it means clouds overhead, but they still let a lot of light through. Today they are barely visible, a light grey blur, and it's still more than enough for the panel to generate 1.2 W and slowly charge the battery again.
We still have the issue of the charger not picking up again after a thicker cloud covered the sun, but it appears on different SDM845 devices as well, so there's hope that this can be fixed with some driver modifications.