Boron minimizing battery and data usage

Connectivity BLE // NFC
1

Hello Everyone,
I’m in the middle of building sort of a GPS tracker type device. I have a Boron and an Ultimate GPS Featherwing. My questions right now revolve around how to limit battery consumption and also data usage. I understand at this time that I apparently can’t use sleep modes on the Boron.

My confusion revolves around Cellular.off(). I intend to upload coordinates occasionally (1-15 minutes possibly depending on location difference). If I turn off the cellular during these intervals, do I have to spend the 4400 bytes required to reconnect to the cloud? Or will my session be saved?

Is the penalty in both data and mA greater if I turn the radio off and on, or just leave it be?

Thanks,
Jake

2

On the Electron, turning off the modem uses more power if you sleep for less than 12 minutes. The same sort of thing will likely apply to the Boron, though it’s a little bit harder to quantify until sleep modes are implemented.

However you will definitely incur both a time to cellular reconnect (blinking green) and a session resume if you turn off the modem. On the Boron LTE, the idle current with cellular on is a little over 20 mA, less than half of that of the Electron 3G, so I would lean against trying to turn the modem on and off right now.

When sleep modes are supported, that position may change.

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