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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?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 17 2018, @10:22PM (2 children)
There's already a wireless protocol designed for this kind of low power - Zigbee. I'm sure I haven't replaced the batteries in my wireless thermostat for over a year, which uses this.
Though with being a different protocol to wifi or bluetooth (64-bit MAC addresses for example!), if a device really needs to be accessible to the Internet or to a more standard ethernet-type network, a gateway or bridging device would be needed to reach the nodes on the zigbee network.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18 2018, @07:12AM (1 child)
ZigBee has been common but is fading. You have the 6LoWPAN [link-labs.com] alternative as a better choice than ZigBee. ZigBee is encumbered by many patents, 6LoWPAN is an open standard [electronics-notes.com] and can be implemented freely. In fact, ZigBee is only royalty-free if used non-commercially [qi-hardware.com]. As an additional kick in the nuts, the ZigBee Alliance is intentionally incompatible with the most widely used free and open source licenses.
On the technical side, 6LoWPAN can also work over Bluetooth, since Bluetooth has come up several times in the comments.
(Score: 2) by isj on Tuesday December 18 2018, @05:17PM
Citation needed.
While I think zigbee is a minor abomination, I haven't seen much serious progress from 6LoWPAN or Thread, let alone interoperable devices.