Universal Tracker - battery usage

1

Hello everyone,

I have a question whetever we have some battery usage stats for Universal Tracker software? On my AFF with 800mAh battery it can rougly stay alive for 3 days with sending data via gsm every 20 minutes. I have accelerometer turned off and the device is communicating with gsm quite well. Are there some tweaks to make it alive for longer period?

2

Hi mike,

Accelerometer consumption is negligible compared to the consumption of the GPS and Modem. What network technology are you using to connect?

A 20 minute interval with GPS and Modem 800mAh over 3 days doesn’t sound that weird, 20 minutes is really fast. The low power part refers to the “when doing nothing” part, if it’s active it will consume quite a bit of power.

Regards,
Thom

3

Thanks for your answer. Could you please provide me with better details about accelerometer configuration? There is an option to basicly set Universal Tracker to send data when device is on the move or it stopped when previously it was moving?

4

Hi mike,

In the universal tracker it seems that the device is only sending if the accelerometer has reported movement. This is to balance energy with relevant information, there should be no need to update the location if no movement was detected.

Unless you have a very specific use case I see no reason why you would not want this.

Regards,
Thom

5

Thank you, that is great function but i quite don’t get the configuration I should pass to the device if I would like to achive only reporting when the movement is being made.

acc parameter defines sensitivity? And then If i set fix and alternative fix interval for time intervals to 0 it will only depend on accelerometer?

6

Hi Mike,

Looking at our universal tracker you probably want to set the fix interval to a much higher number (e.g. 1440) . The fix interval of 1 minute is probably a bit too low, I’d say 10 minutes will probably do just fine but that I’ll leave up to you.

Don’t think you’ll have to change anything else, but it’s been quite some time since I’ve used it. If you’re really struggling to get this configured I can probably try it myself for a bit or dive into the functional code.

Regards,
Thom

7

Do we have power consumption stats from the device using accelerometer?

8

Hi Mike,

The AFF uses the LSM303AGR.


You can check consumption on page 15 and 27.
The magnetometer is disabled and accelero is running at low-power 10Hz, consumption should be less than 10uA.

Regards,
Thom

9

Hi,

I wanted to ask an additional question about a similar usage.
3 days on 800mah isn’t bad i think as well.

I’m however wondering if somebody has combined the AFF R410M with a solar panel to create a solution that could send a GPS coordinate very 30 minutes, and/or every 5 minutes if there is movement.
Of course, the battery can be made larger, but i think it’s more a question of ‘how big must the solar panel be’ to make sure teh battery gets recharged during the day.

I’ve been playing around a lot with the SODAQ ONE v3. It’s great, but i struggle to get to a solution that allows me to do this without additionally charging the battery on USB.
I’ve played around with GPS fix options, interval options, etc, but i just can’t get to a point where it can last for a year on just battery + solar power.

Next to this, of course the SODAQ one is LORA and i’m wondering if the SARA AFF would be a better option for this appliance?