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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: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 18 2018, @12:19AM
Of course it has to talk to something, and even if you play raspi type games the total wattage of "thingie plus what it uplinks to" is usually greater for BT than for "just another wifi device"
With a side dish of you can spec the BT scenario into incredible detail resulting in it beating a generic wifi solution... or vice versa.
TI has a "simplelink" series I have not played with but it only draws a couple LEDs worth of current when operating and practically nothing while sleeping and its marketed as TIs idea of an IOT system on a chip, I have no connection other than being vaguely impressed. I like my old ESP8266 with micropython on them but I find the TI CC3200 series strangely appealing. Of course its a more modern generation so best compared the seemingly eternal beta that is ESP32 series not the "ancient" ESP8266 series...
Something vaguely unclear is what IOT means which impacts its device selection. Is it my garage door or some spy monitoring thing in my pocket theoretically counting steps or a temperature sensor like my thermostat but somehow less useful or a videocamera doorbell or ...
IOT mostly seems in the marketplace to mean no firmware updates so you gonna get powned and they sell your personal data to some mysterious buyers.