Power issues for uses that requires commands sent

Hardware
1

It seems like the photon works great for projects that send things back (like a sensor) because it can pop out of sleep on a schedule and report back. But what about for something that you want to command, like a switch that I can turn on over the internet. That requires wifi on at all times and it burns through battery like crazy. I have a 2400mah battery and it goes dead in 10 hours max. I’m looking for a way to make that at least a week, preferably longer. The switch’s power draw is negligible.

The only solution I can think of is to sleep the device for 10 seconds at a time, wake up to check for function calls, and then sleep again. The downside to this is that the response time for the switch can be up to 10 seconds.

I read about the wifi on with powersave mode, but a Particle employee said it wasn’t implemented yet (I think the post was 21 days ago).

Is there something I’m missing? Getting this project down to 10ma normal usage is my target.

Thanks.

2

WiFi with powersave is certainly on our list, but I’m not sure if even that is enough power saving (if anyone knows the reduction in power saving WiFi it’s @BDub).

In future, we will have persistent function calls, so your device could sleep for X minutes, and then wake up, and if a function call was made to the cloud while it was asleep, the call is then executed when the device wakes.

I hope that helps! :smile:

3

@linus72982, adding to what @mdma said, wifi is not ideal for low power applications requiring “always listening” capability. You may want to consider using a bluetooth device like Bluz which is very low power but also has Particle cloud support :smile:

1 Like
4

It’s in the datasheet :slight_smile: But based on initial testing and not final numbers with final firmware.