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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: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 18 2018, @06:56PM (1 child)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday December 18 2018, @06:56PM (#775967) Journal

    My *standard* bluetooth devices usually have trouble reaching more than five or ten feet away...so with BLE I should expect to get two feet of range in my apartment on a good day? If I need less than five feet of range I'm just gonna run a damn cable. Faster, easier, cheaper, and *far* more reliable.

    Recently I've been playing with some Adafruit Feather M0 wifi devices for building my next home automation setup though. They have just barely enough range to communicate with my router from almost everywhere in my one bedroom apartment (everywhere except the bedroom closet I think...which is actually pretty unfortunate), although some models do accept an external antenna if you need to improve that. Code is pretty simple too (they're Arduino compatible) and I think it even has SSL support...although personally I'm designing the system starting from the assumption that such devices are already compromised. I'll (mostly) trust a properly configured RasPi, but I don't know enough about those tiny boards yet...

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 18 2018, @07:46PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday December 18 2018, @07:46PM (#776004) Journal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_Low_Energy [wikipedia.org]

    Compared to Classic Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy is intended to provide considerably reduced power consumption and cost while maintaining a similar communication range.

    If that is true, then Bluetooth 5 with the option to quadruple range absolutely improves range compared to your existing devices.

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