Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

Fair enough. I guess Lithium batteries don't have a linear voltage decay over their lifetime and each battery may not perform equally depending upon manufacturing variations and its usage pattern.

The real point that I was trying to get over was a hypothesis that in order to test the battery in the CST reliably, it must be taken out and then reinserted into the socket. That action alone causes the LED to blink either 2 or 3 times if it is good or weak respectively.

In my previous test I did allow the battery to recover somewhat in groups of about 25 shots. Each shot interval was about a second, and the recover time was about a minute. After it died, I waited several minutes and tried it again - just one blink and several shots later - dead again!

Since I wasn't able to get the LED to blink 3 times using the test button, it is not a reliable way to verify battery life. Whereas, the battery reinsertion technique seems to fair better, but I'm not 100% sure because I have only two test cases (3.2V for 2 blinks and 1.75V for 3 blinks). It would be nice to have confirmation from PCB if this is as designed or if this is a sheer coincidence of the circuit being energized.

I have not noticed this before, but I will look into it. The original programming was not performed in house, and it may be intentional or a by-product or coincidence, but I do not think it was a specified function (could be wrong).