I wanted to start a discussion here to hopefully help others in the future who might be looking to tweak the power settings of their tracker to extend the battery life as much as possible.
My Tracker is a Heltec Tracker v1.1. It uses a 80516 3200mah battery. I would like to use it for livestock tracking during storm conditions. I need the battery to last 3-4 days between charging. I would love it if it would last a week, but that’s probably a pipe dream.
Default Meshtastic settings without enabling power saving mode consumes 50% of the battery in 3 hours.
With power saving enabled and the following settings it consumed 64% in 6 hours. That’s a little over 10% per hour. I need to get that down to close to 1% an hour.
Wait for bluetooth - 0
Super deep sleep - 900
Light sleep - 300
Minimum wake - 60
If anyone has already tested this and has a set of recommended settings, please let me know.
I spoke with Heltec via email and they recommend using GPIO pin 3 to control the GPS module. They recommend these settings for Position to limit GPS power consumption, but said this should be default in the Meshtastic firmware for this model.
RX pin 33
TX pin 34
GPS EN 3
I have my position broadcast set at 900
Smart broadcast minimum distance 10
Smart broadcast minimum interval 900
I will post updates after I test some more power config setting changes. I look forward to hearing what you might have found that works or if I am missing a setting that is a power hog that should be adjusted.
I’ve made a quick look into the Meshtastic firmware source code.
This code is not appropriate for Heltec Tracker V1.1 because it causes an excessive battery drain.
A code that is ‘battery safe’ for HTIT-V1.1 should look like that:
#ifdef ADC_CTRL // enable adc voltage divider when we need to read
pinMode(ADC_CTRL, ADC_CTRL_ENABLED == LOW ? INPUT_PULLDOWN : INPUT_PULLUP);
delay(10);
#endif
@Dk45 You should file an issue for the Meshtastic team on GitHub
Update:
5 days and it has traveled 2.86 miles by way of Horse (literally). Battery at 18% with the settings stated above in my second post.
Note: when it dropped below 25% it stopped reporting the battery level.
I know this is not pretty, but it works for testing.
maybe you consider using a RAK device instead,
rak19003 baseboard with 4631 and gps
slightly more costly, but you safe money on batterys and work-time
those run almost endlessly , compared to the device you are using.
on a 3000mAh it will run for weeks in standard settings
(depending on usage: around 150-250mAh/day)
if you use it in tracker mode (just broadcasting position in time interval, sleep most of the time )
it will probably run for months on one battery charge. (15mAh -100mAh /day, depends on settings)
if you let the device have some sunshine, the smallest solar panel will keep it running endlessly in tracker mode !
i have rak devices that function well in “tacker role” : “sleep XX minutes, wake up, get postion, send postion, sleep.”
, i dont know if that is possible on your heltec devcie, but you could try that… that would 10fold runtime on battery :
try “tracker role” power savong enabled on your device !
if that works:
i wont contribute to the mesh like that, but send out positions with longer battery runtime.
@kilroy
Thanks for the recommendation, but this thread is for the Heltec Tracker.
Yes the device setting is set for Tracker. I think we could see longer battery life with the RAK, but its not what I have.
I am using the power saving settings in my second post. It did last nearly 5 full days. My goal was 3-4 so I think it over shot it.
On a side note, I think the Heltex Tracker would be perfect for a vehicle tracker or something more industrial like. Its odd that the RAK is the only one with holes in the board to secure it to a mounting board, but that says something for RAK devices.
Tea: I have been conversing with support from Heltec and they don’t have much documentation when it comes to the Meshtastic project, but are working to fix that. I did request some inside information on what the engineering specifications were for its design to better target the settings that the engineer designed it to function with, but no response at the time of this posting.
ah 5 days is good did the device sleep between fixes ?
i ordered a heltec capsule V3 (that has not arrived yet) it has a very small battery built in , and i am very courious if that one is working in tracker role or not
@kilroy yes its sleeping between GPS fixes and it always has between 8 and 12 sats fixed. I was thinking of adding the small GPS battery to mine but its working well so I don’t see the need. You might get longer sleep times with the battery added though.
I’m trying to replicate your setup on my Heltec Capsule Sensor v3, I am already surprised that I managed to consume only 50% of the battery in 1h compared to the normal usage where it last just a bit more than 1hr.
However I am a bit confused by the telemetries I received from my other node and I am suspecting that the node is’t actually sleeping as much as it should.
I’m running as tracker mode with the same setting you described (the gps en pin is different obviously).
From my understanding, the device should never send position more often than 15 minutes but I can see it sending even multiple times each minute (140 points in the last hour)
did the device sleep between fixes ?
