Newbie question with iBeacon Station NRF51822. Power consumption

[aguedob]

Hi all,

I've bought an iBeacon Station NRF51822 like this one (linksprite.com/.../index.php5. My idea is using it as a temp sensor for my smart home installation. It works fine but the battery is drained in less than a week. I've verified that the power consumption is around 900ua between advertisements, which explains the battery drain. Is this normal? Is there any way to reduce power without NRF51-DK?

[Matt]

What's your advertising interval? Is it always 0.9mA in between advertising? What's mAh for your battery source?

[aguedob]

Well, I mentioned 900ua between advertising, but in fact this is the consumption measured when no device is connected to the iBeacon. I have no idea about the current advertisement interval, but should be the default factory I suppose.

[endnode]

You seems to have also vague understanding of differences between advertising/scanning and connected link stages;) What exact FW you have in that beacon?

[aguedob]

As I mentioned Im a newbie with this device. How can I identify the FW installed? I've just have the iBeacon device (no jlink cable or dev board)

[endnode]

I see "factory default" FW on linksprite.com page but only binaries (HEX files), no sources. This is not how you normally debug power consumption. Usual procedure is to do simple FW with configurable activities and then you measure them in isolated cases. Based on these numbers and performance you need (it's logical that faster advertising or smaller connection interval delivers higher data throughput and lower latency, but it's question if you need it) you set your "production" parameters and measure the FW with them. Finally there are tons of posts here on the forum how to optimize FW (in source code as well as use cases) for lower power consumption (again it's just a trade-off of your skills and time you want to invest vs. results you want).