Boron LTE consuming more power than it should

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I’ve been doing some tests with a 3rd party SIM on a Boron LTE. I did some testing with v1.2.0 beta and right now one of my borons is not working properly, to be more specific, it is consuming more than it was before (about 160 mA more constantly). This with no code change just usage. I left it running for about 18 hours and then it started and now I can’t get it to return to the normal consumption.

I have tried returning to a stable version: 1.1.0 (which got out yesterday) and got the same results. The thing is that everything is working as it was before, but now is consuming more energy.

I don’t know if I have messed with something internally, but it seems like the only explanation.

Thanks in advance.

2

Hi Jose,

Thanks for reaching out. Perhaps an odd question to get started, but have you monitored the data usage or data patterns on this device? I would be interested to know if you have modified the keepAlive timeout as well.

Particle SIMs typically allow for longer timeouts. When tested for our 2G/3G line of products, we found a 23 minute timeout to work for our devices. For other providers, this may be as low as 30 seconds to 7 minutes.

It’s possible that if you are using a different SIM that requires a shorter timeout, there may be a number of failed messages sent and retried. There’s also the possibility that for each failed message, a reconnection payload to the cloud is being sent. This could easily attribute to excess data usage over a first party SIM if more and larger payloads are being sent more frequently.

1 Like
3

Hi Stanley,

Thank you for your response, but perhaps I may have not explained myself properly. I have no problem with data usage. The problem with the first Boron is that after 18 hours of running the code with OS 1.2 (which sleeps 20 minutes, wakes up, gathers data, and then goes back to sleep) it is now consuming more energy. For instance, when sleeping it consumed 1 mA and now consumes nearly 170 mA and gets a little warmer.

I have no connection or data usage problems, the issue is the sudden rise of power consumption that makes my project unviable.

I wanted to report what happened to see if something I did with the new firmware could have messed with my device internally, because now even with older OS I get high consumption on this device.

4

Hi Jose,

No worries. I asked in regards to third party SIM and extra data usage because I was under the impression you were comparing power usage from a 1st party Sim vs a 3rd party SIM.

In regards to excess power usage during sleep, this is a known issue with Borons. Efforts are being made internally to address this and I believe there are goals to try and get this into our v1.3.0 Device OS version at the latest.

I’m uncertain why it didn’t occur before, but this is a known issue and it will be addressed soon. :slight_smile:

5

I understand. The issue here is that the boron consumes considerably more all the time, not just during sleep. Now it consumes ~160 mA more than before and gets hotter. That’s why I think it may be a hardware failure caused by prolonged usage.

Thank you for your response, regards.

6

That’s certainly unusual. Prolonged usage alone shouldn’t cause that, even during non-sleep.

When you mention it’s hot–are we talking warm to the touch–or very hot, to the point of burning/concern? If it is the latter, please file a support ticket referencing this topic. :slight_smile: