LTE Beacon and energy saving factory

LTE Beacons
1

Hello everyone,

In the API documentation for the LTE Beacon, I see no calls that puts the device into sleep mode in order to reduce power consumption. Then, I assume that the device puts itself in sleep mode seeminglessly when it does not perform active tasks.

Is this assumption correct or something in particular must be followed in order to minimize power consumption when idling?

Thank you!

2

When device is not performing any activity it puts itself into sleep mode automatically. User code does not need to worry about that. It should focus more on “business logic”: how often use power-hungry features, for how long, when to use them. For example instead of scanning all the time, maybe scan when device moves and only in business hours.
You can check current power consumption using sensors.battery.getAvgCurrent()
There is a chapter in documentation about action-reaction programming model.
If you want to be power efficient with your LTE Beacon here are some tips:

  • Batch data using cloud.enqueue and send it daily/weekly. Use sync.now() only with urgent data.
  • Reduce LED brightness to level that is really necessary
  • Quickly blink LEDs every few seconds instead of turning them on constantly
  • Run BLE scanning for few seconds every minute or two instead of constant scanning
  • Move complicated data processing to Cloud Code
1 Like
3

Thanks a lot Łukasz for the thorough answer

4

Hi on contrary is it possible to let the lte beacon connected to power supply in order to make constant scanning ?

5

See the discussion Safe to continuously power the LTE Beacon