How to increase Lenovo laptop's battery life

A common issue on online forums for Lenovo Laptops are the battery life. Personally I have dealt with this problem on the Lenovo L340 Gaming Laptop. Most of Lenovo Laptops include a specification of around 7 to 8 hours of battery life for browsing, video watching and other day to day tasks. However, in forums, this battery life has been reduced to 2 hours from the high power draw from the processor and display. The following photos will describe ways to get a better battery life, of around 7 to 8 hours.

With the following modifications, it has led to 7 hours and 30 mins of browsing with just 86% power

1. Turning off Background apps in the privacy setting on Windows 10. Turning this off will prevent any unimportant apps from running such as calculator, Skype and bloatware.

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2. Going into control panel for battery management, additional power options can be chosen. When closing the laptop lid, or pressing the power button, the setting was changed from sleep to hibernate to preserve battery life while travelling. In addition, the graphics was changed to maximum battery life on battery mode.

3. One of the main settings that contributed to high power savings was minimum and maximum processor state. On battery mode, the minimum processor state was changed from 5% to 0 % and maximum processor state from 100% to 10%. On the L340, no major differences could be spotted by changing these settings, however did drastically increase battery life. Reducing the processor state prevents the CPU from being used to its fullest(draw the most power), thus benefits battery life and CPU lifetime.

How to set up SSH with Raspberry Pi and PuTTY

The Raspberry Pi, a miniaturized computer provides an ability to complete many tasks on such a small device. In this post, the Raspberry Pi 3B used will be running Raspian as it is the most common free operating system. Sometimes when typing on the command prompt, it may be tedious to do certain tasks typing on the Raspberry Pi and multitasking on other sites. This is where utilizing the Raspberry Pi's SSH allows for users to remotely type on the Pi's command prompt from just a laptop. This provides the ease of multitasking and using the clipboard.

To enable this feature, the preferences in the Raspberry Pi must be changed:

Going to the start menu, and into preferences will show Raspberry Pi configurations button.

Clicking onto that, and going into Interfaces, the SSH must be enabled.

Now the Raspberry Pi has been accommodated to use SSH.

On the computer side, PuTTY must be downloaded from the site https://www.putty.org/.

Click on the here link on that page.

Now this brings you to the available files that can be downloaded. Choose the appropriate file for your operating system, either 32 or 64 bits.

Click the file once it is downloaded to run the installation process.

(In the installation process, a box can be checked to create a desktop icon for PuTTY)

Opening the application will look like this.

Now making sure the Pi is connected to the same network as the computer, look for the Raspberry Pi's IP address. In my scenario, I opened a hot spot which allowed my Raspberry Pi to connect and easily reveal the IP address. In other situation, utilizing a free app called Fing, will allow you to see all the IP addresses of the devices connected to the network.

With the computer hot spot setup, the IP address of the Raspberry Pi will be shown.

Now copy the IP address into the spot that says Host Name (or IP address).

The IP address can be saved with a corresponding name (Raspberry was used above)

Clicking Save will show the session stored underneath Default Settings.

To open the SSH connection, double click on the saved session or click open.

This will be the screen after the connection is opened. 

In all Raspberry Pi's there is a default login id and password which is required to connect.

The default id is pi.

The default password is raspberry. (When typing in the password, the password will not show on screen nor move the cursor, so don't be alarmed)

After the connection is established, this is what the final screen should look like. Now you can directly type into the command prompt of the Raspberry Pi from a computer.

Fixing Quality of 3D Prints

On the left illustrates the progression of the quality of 3D printed cubed. Going down the photo, the cubes progressively become more precise and neater. The factors that were resolved or reduced were ghosting, stepper motor calibration, acceleration, jerk and replacement of the nozzle.

Ghosting: (cube 1 and 2)
The term referring to the subtle disruptions in the printing lines are clearly shown in cube 1 and 2. The ghosting effect is caused due to vibration of the motors, causing the extruder to subtly wobble while printing. This issue can be resolved by using foam pads on the bottom of the printer's feet to absorb shaking.

Stepper motor calibration: (cube 2,3,4)
This was an issue which would resolve over or under extrusion issues in the prints. In the imperfect prints at the top, bulges around the print can be observed. These bulges can be the result of over extrusion, when the extruder pushes more filament out than it should.

Acceleration and Jerk:(5)
In a custom/ commercial printer, the acceleration and jerk settings can be changed so that the print speeds can be increased. However, with these settings increased, it can result in a poor quality print found in the black cube. Reducing the acceleration in a Cartesian printer to around 500 and the jerk to around 10 for the x,y, and z axis produced better results. In addition, increase the retraction acceleration seemed to have benefited the prints.

Nozzle Replacement: (cube 6)
The printer used to print the black cube has have over a year of printing, thus leading to a degrading of the nozzle and the quality of the nozzle diameter. This degradation can lead to inconsistent printing pressures and thicker print lines. In the last print, a new 0.4mm nozzle is used, and it obviously shows a greater improvement. *A different file was used in cube 6 to demonstrate the finer detailed print of smaller spacer