Vibrations et tonalités fantômes

Liszto

@Łukasz-Szmigiel any news from Suunto here on that topic ?
The Suunto 9PP of my wife have the issue and it is worst and worst, now it’s battery is draining something like more than 20% per day probably due to that and the amount of vibration is very annoying 🫠

She hopes to have a fix for that and she hopes it’s battery won’t be “damaged” by that…

Łukasz Szmigiel · S9PP 2.50.28

@Liszto I doubt that it’ll get fixed.

Liszto

@Łukasz-Szmigiel ok

@isazi for the follow up just in case

Woodster

@Liszto For me it was the compass widget recalibrating itself automatically ( as mentioned here ), when I removed the widget the phantom alerts stopped completely.

Martin
Suunto 9 Peak Pro

duffman19

@Woodster I never thought to remove the widget. Such a simple solution. I just tried this and can confirm that it stops the phantom calibration alerts.

Only problem with this, though, is that it seems to disables the compass auto-calibration completely. So the next time you start an activity, there is a good chance that the compass will not be calibrated. I think the watch relies on proper compass calibration for certain features like FusedSpeed and proper GPS tracing.

Elipsus

@Woodster Good tips…to bad I use the compass regularly !
how had is it do update the software to remove the vibrations for the compass ???

duffman19

@Elipsus said:

how had is it do update the software to remove the vibrations for the compass ???

Not hard at all, I would imagine. All of the other watches auto-calibrate in the background without the bzzz-bzzz notification. It feels like a piece of code just got left out for the 9PP.

compass-auto-calibration {
if screen = compass_widget {
vibration_notification = yes
} else {
vibration_notification = no
}}

Unfortunately, the 9PP has been left behind, so there will be no simple update.

However, if you do remove the compass widget (by unchecking it in the widget settings in the Suunto App), you still have access to it by scrolling to the bottom of the widget list on the watch and selecting “All apps.” The only difference is that it will no longer auto-calibrate once removed from that main widget list, so you’ll need to double-check the calibration status before starting an activity.

Łukasz Szmigiel · S9PP 2.50.28

Be advised that “tokens have been burned” to arrive at the following conclusion

S9PP: why the watch vibrates when it recalibrates the compass in the background (Sapporo 2.50.28)

While digging through the watch firmware to optimize my SuuntoPlus apps, I also took a look at this long-standing problem, and here is what I found.

What happens

Some of us get a vibration while the watch is just sitting on the wrist, with no workout and the screen off, especially near metal. I traced it through the firmware, and it comes from two things working together.

The vibration. A global system module called Effect listens to /Device/Measurement/MagneticField/Calibration. Every time that value becomes true, it plays the Success indication, the same one you get after a manual compass calibration. It doesn’t check who started the calibration, whether a compass screen is open, or whether you’re in a workout. With the settings TonesMode=AllOff and VibrationMode=ButtonOff, you get vibration without sound.
Why it fires at rest. Auto-calibration only happens while the magnetometer is running, and the magnetometer only runs when something is subscribed to compass heading. The compass mini widget (the one in the widget list under the watch face) subscribes with plain subscribe rather than subscribe-when-shown. Its container in c-widgm.xml has no autoUnload, so the firmware never unloads it after it’s hidden. The result is a heading subscriber that stays alive after you leave the screen. CompassProvider keeps MagneticField active, and the magnetometer keeps sampling all day. Near metal it keeps losing and regaining calibration, and each regain triggers a Success vibration.

Suunto has already changed this on a newer watch, but not for the S9PP

I compared this with Xiamen 2.56.18 (Suunto Vertical 2). The widget files are byte-for-byte identical, but the native Effect module no longer subscribes to the calibration resource at all. It listens to 9 resources instead of 10, and the calibration branch is gone. It still plays Success after a successful sensor pairing. In my scan I found no other native subscriber to the calibration resource that plays an indication, but I can’t rule out that the handling was moved somewhere I didn’t look, so I don’t know whether calibration still gives feedback there. Either way, this would explain why only S9PP owners report the vibration: on the 2.56 line the cause I found doesn’t exist. Since Suunto has ended development of the S9PP, we won’t get that firmware, so the problem stays in 2.50.28 for good.

Why this isn’t trivial to fix from the outside

Effect is native firmware code, not a UI file. It’s a shared module, and Success also confirms successful sensor pairing. You can’t just mute it.
The calibration notification carries no information about who started the calibration, and the module doesn’t check it. So the module can’t tell a manual calibration from an automatic one.

Why unloading the mini widget is the best workaround we have

To be clear, this is a trade-off, not a fix. The vibration comes from Effect reacting to every Calibration=true, and that part is native firmware we can’t touch. What we can do is stop the thing that triggers it. At rest, the only thing keeping the magnetometer running is the hidden compass widget. Unload the widget and the magnetometer stops, so the watch can no longer recalibrate on its own, and Effect has nothing to react to.

So the vibration goes away because the background auto-calibration goes away, not because the vibration was fixed. What you lose is the compass quietly keeping itself calibrated in the background. It still calibrates when you actually open the compass or the widget, as it does when you start a workout or navigation.

The easiest way to do it is to disable the compass widget in the widget list. It also saves some battery.

A file swap gives the same result

Instead of disabling the widget, you could replace ui/templ/c-widgm.xml with a version that adds <autoUnload>true</autoUnload> to the compass container. The firmware parser does support that tag. The widget would then unload about 5 seconds after being hidden, the heading subscription would go away, and the magnetometer would stop. It has exactly the same consequence as disabling the widget:

No background auto-calibration while the widget isn’t on screen.
Effect still plays Success on any calibration. If something else legitimately keeps the magnetometer running (navigation, a workout, the full compass screen), a background recalibration can still make the watch vibrate.

I wouldn’t recommend the swap over simply disabling the widget. It gives the same effect with more risk: it means writing to a system folder, and a broken template could break the main watch UI. I haven’t confirmed that the watch even allows that write. Its one advantage is that, with no more firmware updates coming, it wouldn’t get overwritten.

Pierre 0

@Łukasz-Szmigiel
Did someone already evaluate the battery saving between compass widget loaded and unloaded ?
Is it worthy outside ghost vibration issue ?
Also unloading the widget does this lead to a longer time for the watch to get ready when we start an activity ?
Your findings make me think that there are only good reasons to unload the compass widget on the 9PP.

Łukasz Szmigiel · S9PP 2.50.28

@Pierre-0 I assume that battery use is marginal, not worth the unloading alone. It’s one subscription running in background without triggering the screen which is the major power hog. Unloading of this widget means no automatic calibration and compass is being used in the navigation (fused heading), so to me it’s better to have it calibrated all the time. The vibrations don’t bug me as they don’t happen very often so I just leave it on.

duffman19

@Łukasz-Szmigiel That is some awesome detective work, sir. And it’s quite amazing to see confirmation of the bug and “solution” that we users had to figure out on our own.

I have removed the compass widget from my 9PP to avoid the bzzz (I would get them quite frequently otherwise). My solution to ensure compass calibration before an activity is to check it in the bearing navigation option (pre-activity menu -> Navigation -> Bearing). Here you can see if the compass is correctly calibrated. If not, usually just performing the figure-8 motion sets it straight. Or, as a last resort, you can touch the watch to a magnetic surface (like a car door handle) to trigger the compass reset and calibration. I then back out of the bearing option without actually setting one.

As for battery hit with and without the compass widget, I have not perceived any difference. The increased battery drain many of us have experienced must be due to something else. Maybe @Łukasz-Szmigiel can do some more digging to solve this one, too.

Łukasz Szmigiel · S9PP 2.50.28

@duffman19 I was thinking that maybe I’d use LLMs to create a simple script to just push a fix onto the watch as I’ve already managed to dump all the files from the watch for inspection but it’s pretty pointless considering the root cause can’t be easily patched and in fact it’s patched in later firmware versions that… Aren’t meant for S9PP.

I wish the firmware was open sourced at one point which would allow us to push some QOL fixes to older devices.

And besides - this is a huge machinery so no wonder tracking a battery drain takes Suunto so long.

Elipsus

@Łukasz-Szmigiel This is honestly what icks me the most.
It’s a known problem at Suunto, it’s easily fixable, its fixed on newer watches, but they just refuse to push the fix to older watches.
It doesn’t cost them any meaningful amount of money, its a BUG (not a feature), it should be fixed, even if the device is a few years old, especially since the device is still being sold today.

Not fixing bugs a watch still being sold is really, really not consumer oriented at all.

Łukasz Szmigiel · S9PP 2.50.28

@Elipsus said:

It doesn’t cost them any meaningful amount of money

It does. It’s not a copy/paste situation.

Elipsus

@Łukasz-Szmigiel Is it not ? 9PP and newer watches share the same “base OS”, thus the bugfix should be relatively portable removing the bug doesn’t increase CPU load, or memory load, nor it use more storage.

@Łukasz-Szmigiel said:

A global system module called Effect listens to /Device/Measurement/MagneticField/Calibration. Every time that value becomes true, it plays the Success indication, the same one you get after a manual compass calibration. It doesn’t check who started the calibration, whether a compass screen is open, or whether you’re in a workout. With the settings TonesMode=AllOff and VibrationMode=ButtonOff, you get vibration without sound.

Here, the fix is there, Effect shouldn’t subscribe to the Calibration, it looks literally like a one-liner to fix.

And even if it wasn’t a copy/paste situation, the 9 peak pro is an actively sold smartwatch, bug fix should be expected, people are literally buying this watch right now from Suunto and being said that “your 2 days old watch has an identified bug, corrected in other watches, that won’t be fixed on your watch, sorry”, that’s BS.

I’m a vocal advocate to “no more updates”, I said it many times in this forum, i never expected new features on a watch, what I buy, what I’m being advertised is what I expect to get, but bugfix, especially as trivial as this one, is what I expect.

And while we’re at it, people a buying right now a watch advertised as a 21 days battery life :

Who ever gets 40h of GPS or 21 days of smartwatch battery on a 9PP? that banner is a lie since 2024

duffman19

@Elipsus said:

Who ever gets 40h of GPS or 21 days of smartwatch battery on a 9PP?

The 40h of GPS activity in Performance mode is still pretty accurate. My experience puts it maybe closer to 36-38h. But, yes, 21 days of day-to-day battery life was only possible upon release, before the firmware switched to full 24/7 HR monitoring.

I agree that the responsible thing to do would be to update specs when software updates create significant changes. And the time to do that would have been 3+ years ago now. At this point, Suunto is clearly just selling out inventory of the 9PP. I’d be surprised if it’s even still available in a month or two. So there’s no way they’re putting any effort or money into this thing now, right or wrong as that may be.

Not giving Suunto a pass here, but I can’t think of another scenario where a tech company actually did update the spec sheet for a product after its initial release to reflect software updates. Maybe there’s protocol for these things, or perhaps there’s some sort of consumer rights argument to be made.

Łukasz Szmigiel · S9PP 2.50.28

@Elipsus said:

Who ever gets 40h of GPS or 21 days of smartwatch battery on a 9PP? that banner is a lie since 2024

40 hours of GPS? I do. As of smartwatch use - I don’t know as I use it for workouts too but I don’t have any problems with battery drainage.

Would I like the Suunto to fix the bug? Sure. But I also understand why they won’t. That’s why I believe a good solution for older devices would be to open source the firmware. But this may not happen because of proprietary technologies inside the firmware that Suunto may not want to go public.

Elipsus

@Łukasz-Szmigiel I tried to maximize the battery life during a multi day bike trip, and switched to “endurance” mode while disabling all smartwatches features, roughly 30hours of battery life.
And smartwatch use, considering that, without any notifications or sport activity, I loose about 10% per day…so that’s 10 days max

Elipsus

@duffman19

@duffman19 said:

Maybe there’s protocol for these things

Oh yes there is a protocol, its called “lets run our automated battery benchmark tool tool one more time, and edit a web page”

@duffman19 said:

But, yes, 21 days of day-to-day battery life was only possible upon release, before the firmware switched to full 24/7 HR monitoring.

I don’t mind honestly, the 24/7 monitoring is great, but leaving it as “21 days”, since 2 years+, is just bad, and its not like we can revert to the old “every 5 minute monitoring”

duffman19

@Elipsus said:

“endurance” mode while disabling all smartwatches features, roughly 30hours of battery life.

Sounds like you may have a defective unit.