Battery Estimation

This section is very interesting from management perspective. If gives insights into the expected battery life of the device.

It is useful for a quick reference on what to expect from your battery life and also provides information that can be used for troubleshooting if battery life is subpar.

Let us look at the example in the image below. It is a Vicki running with the default 10 min keepalive time. It has been working well with a stable network connection, no frequent re-joins and sending on SF7.

These are optimal conditions and this is reflected in the device's battery life.

The device has a Projected battery life of 8.5 years, that has been evaluated over a period of 321 days. If we count the evaluation period this device will run close to 10 years, which is considered a very good longevity even for a cutting edge IoT device.

Battery estimation

Additionally the overall consumption in mAh is also listed in case you need another form of representation of the expected battery life. Overall, the Pi chart is more than enough to give you a good idea what to expect and how you can adjust the settings of your device (or improve your network coverage).

For example if you have more than 5% power consumption due to join-requests your network range/stability needs work.

If the device has a lot of Idle time 10% and up, yet there is high motor consumption, this could indicate a hardware issue.

If the communication portion of the chart is overtaking the motor consumption one, this means you are sending way too often, wasting energy.