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posted by martyb on Monday December 17 2018, @08:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the plug-it-in dept.

Hackaday:

The Internet of Things is eating everything alive, and the world wants to know: how do you make a small, battery-powered, WiFi-enabled microcontroller device? This is a surprisingly difficult problem. WiFi is not optimized for low-power operations. It’s power-hungry, and there’s a lot of overhead. That said, there are microcontrollers out there with WiFi capability, but how do they hold up to running off of a battery for days, or weeks? That’s what [TvE] is exploring in a fantastic multi-part series of posts delving into low-power WiFi microcontrollers.

The idea for these experiments is set up in the first post in the series. Basically, the goal is to measure how long the ESP8266 and ESP32 will run on a battery, using various sleep modes. Both the ESP8266 and ESP32 have deep-sleep modes, a ‘sleep’ mode where the state is preserved, a ‘CPU only’ mode that turns the RF off, and various measures for sending and receiving a packet.

The takeaway from these experiments is that a battery-powered ESP8266 can’t be used for more than a week without a seriously beefy battery or a solar panel.

Power consumption and battery life remain limitations for IoT applications. How can they be overcome?


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by EventH0rizon on Monday December 17 2018, @09:09PM (4 children)

    by EventH0rizon (936) on Monday December 17 2018, @09:09PM (#775558) Journal

    I tend to agree.

    And when we need more range than bluetooth, we use ultra low power LoRa Wan AVRs like this one:

          https://wisen.com.au/store/products/whisper-node-lora/ [wisen.com.au]

    (which really will run on a battery for months) to solve that same problem. Of course, we then have to contend with the miserly bandwidth available, but for some classes of problem it's sufficient.

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  • (Score: 2) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday December 17 2018, @09:19PM

    by suburbanitemediocrity (6844) on Monday December 17 2018, @09:19PM (#775565)

    I would think most classes.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 17 2018, @09:30PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 17 2018, @09:30PM (#775567) Journal

    Really? $38 for a uC board?

    Man, the shrimpy [shrimping.it] way [raspberryalphaomega.org.uk] with a good regulator [pololu.com] is cheaper - you should be able to find the components and put them together in a true DIY for less than half the price.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by EventH0rizon on Monday December 17 2018, @09:52PM

      by EventH0rizon (936) on Monday December 17 2018, @09:52PM (#775581) Journal

      The board I linked to is a LoRa device. It's a long range, low-powered wireless black box that has performed well (so far) for us in external environments.

      But thanks for the Shrimpy link, that's a cool, bare-bones Ardiuno at a very nice price.

  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:38PM

    by anubi (2828) on Tuesday December 18 2018, @10:38PM (#776087) Journal

    Thanks for that. I am always on the lookout for stuff that may remain dormant for decades, but work when you need it.f

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]