Minimizing Wifi Battery Drain in IoT Projects
2024-12-22
In the early development of PetDrifts, an IoT device using an ESP32 C3, battery life was a major challenge, lasting only a day. The culprit was identified as high power consumption during HTTP POST requests every 15 minutes. To address this, the team explored two solutions: switching from TCP to UDP to reduce network overhead, and adopting MQTT for persistent connections and lower power usage. While improvements were observed, the battery life wasn't sufficient. Ultimately, they opted for a Bluetooth MCU to achieve significantly longer battery life.