Foolography Community

I use Unleashed N1 with Nikon D4. I did not notice any important issue with fw 1.0 but after updating to the latest fw (1.2.0/1.2.1) I registered an enormous battery drain -- fully charged battery is empty in about 2 days even when the camera is off (without any photo taken). Thanks for any suggestion.
(off topic: Thanks for the new Unleashed, I was really surprised how it is small and functional)

Hi rekros,

thanks for the report, and sorry for the issue!

We have also noticed a too high power drain, but to be honest did not notice it getting worse form v1.0 to 1.2. We are looking into power-saving possibilities and have already implemented quite a few for version 1.3.
We'll have another look on what we changed in v 1.2 that might have made it worse, and will make sure to improve that again!

Are you using the USB cable? is GPS turned on?

BTW: instead of unplugging the Unleashed all the time it's considerably easier to remove the battery for now, until we get the power issues fixed.

Hi Oliver,
thanks for your reply. I use Unleashed without USB cable and mainly for geotagging. To be honest I didn't make any tests with old fw, but for sure the battery did not die after two days as it happened last week. So I tried it again this week -- I inserted a fully charged battery and left my camera switched off. The battery was empty after two days and few hours. (I used an original Nikon battery (life cycle 0) and a non-original Patona one (life cycle 0) with similar result.)

rekros wrote: ↑

February 22nd, 2019, 7:16 pm

I use Unleashed N1 with Nikon D4. I did not notice any important issue with fw 1.0 but after updating to the latest fw (1.2.0/1.2.1) I registered an enormous battery drain -- fully charged battery is empty in about 2 days even when the camera is off (without any photo taken). Thanks for any suggestion.
(off topic: Thanks for the new Unleashed, I was really surprised how it is small and functional)

I am experiencing similar battery drain on my Nikon D7500 even when turned off and the iPhone app closed out.

Hmm, 2 days sounds extremely fast - we haven't noticed that kind of a drain.

But we'll look into it!

We've already added additional power saving to the next firmware, but this was supposed to improve power consumption drastically even from version 1.0. Well check what changed going to version 1.2, to make sure we counter that negative effect again too.

Could I add myself to rekros' issue, just to bulk out the numbers reporting this issue? I'm using an N2 with a Nikon D7200 with zero wear batteries and a battery is down to half within a few weeks of non-use. Maybe I was spoiled with the original Unleashed's minuscule usage :)

We've reduced the power consumption drastically already, but have also noticed that on some cameras it's worse than others. The case we found is that on some cameras, as the Unleashed is going into a powersaving mode, it falsely registers a button-press, which wakes it up again. So this might be the main cause of the huge drain some users are seeing, depleting their camera in days, compared to the more normal drain, which drains the battery in several weeks (which we still think is too high, by our standards).

We haven't yet implemented a foolproof solution for that false detection, but it's on our todo list.

Can you let me know if the Unleashed's LED ever turns off completely? When the Unleashed goes to sleep, we turn off the LED entirely to save all the battery we can. So if your Unleashed's LED keeps slowly pulsing turqoise, even after your camera has been turned off for more than 30 minutes, that would confirm my suspicion, and explain the abnormally large powerdrain.

Sorry for a delay. I tried it with fw 1.2.1 (which I had problem with) and LED stopped blinking few seconds after camera has been turned off. Unleashed has turned LED off regardless of being connected to application (turquise color) or not (orange color). After update to version 1.3.2 the LED blinks for about one or two minutes when the Unleashed is not connected and about 15 minutes when it’s connected to Android app. Honestly I can barely see any difference — after approx. 2 days of "inactivity" my battery is empty (when I did this "test" I switched my camera on ten times for a few seconds just to check battery status; no shots were taken; most of the time the Unleashed was not connected; the LED was off but the Unleashed was warm a bit whenever I touched it).
Please let me know if there will be any solution to this issue as I cannot use the Unleshed at this point (I use it mainly for geotagging and loading/unloading battery permanently isn’t much handy...)
Thanks

Hi rekos,

if the Unleashed is warm to touch, that sounds like a hardware issue to be honest, which would also explain a huge battery drain.
If it only started after a while (you mentioned that you only noticed after the firmware update), is it possible that something fell into the open socket that is causing a short between some pins? You can try hold the Unleashed upside down and use compressed air to blow out anything that might have fallen in.

can you be more specific about the temperature? if you have an infrared thermometer (for example the kind to measure fever in the ears) can you check the difference between the Unleashed when you just plug it in after a couple of hours not using it, and after using it for 10 minutes?

If you can't measure it, can you try to describe how much warmer it is? (difficult, I know!) You can try using your lips to feel the temperature on the Unleashed - they're WAY more sensitive to small temperature differences!

Maybe the kiss will let the Unleashed feel more appreciated and it'll show more kindness to you too :-D