[Q] Android with a month of battery life?

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sheiff

New member
Nov 6, 2011
1
0
Hi all!

I'm working on a cool University project here in Russia.
We have to make a mobile device that works for about a month without any charging.
Device should only wake up every day at 23:55 and send POST request to server to tell that "I'm doing science and I'm still alive.". :D

We've started with an Android device, ZTE racer and installed Cyanogen firmware.
We've made an application that:
  • enables AIRPLANE_MODE
  • asks AlarmManager to wake up at 23:55 every day
  • at 23:55 it disables AIRPLANE_MODE for a minute, aquires a wake lock for a minute
  • then sends "I'm doing science and I'm still alive." to server
  • and enables AIRPLANE_MODE again to save battery.

Right now we are getting 5-10 days of battery life.
I suppose that we could extremely increase battery life by:
  • removing some applications from firmware including "phone" and others
  • shutting down some services right in kernel sources. (In fact, we just need gprs and nothing else. We don't need Wifi, eccelerometer, GPS, ...)
  • decreasing CPU speed from application

I have couple of questions:
  1. Is it theoretically possible to have 1 month of bettery life for an Android device? (I know that Kindle have more than 2 months of battery, so why we can't?)
  2. Does anybody have an Android-based book reader? How long could it live in sleep mode and wifi turned off?
  3. If device has no 3rdparty application installed, and it's sleeping in AIRPLANE_MODE... Who could possibly eat battery at that time?!!
  4. Could you please give any kind of advice for our problem?

Thank you very much in advance!
 
Last edited:

litanyoffail

Member
Aug 1, 2011
36
3
I'd say yes it's possible to get that much battery life... Some suggestions from the top of my head:

Undervolt and/or underclock the processor (like you said), but do this from the kernel, rather than an application.

uninstall any unecessary system apps/turning off services (like you said)

Assuming your script/application is checking the system time of the phone to know when to wake, try having it just run an internal timer instead... I don't know how much battery life that would take, but I imagine that checking against its own timer would save battery vs requesting the time from the phone itself.

Assuming you haven't already, Try having so the display NEVER TURNS ON without physical input (i.e. pressing a button on the phone). The screen is a massive battery drain.