Power consumption measurement for WiFi

Question

I want to measure how much battery is consumed while switching on Wifi, scanning and connecting to a an AP. I tried doing it with the API to see battery level. But that API gives battery level on a scale of 100 which is not granular enough to find out the power consumed in turning on the Wifi and scanning only once.

Is there a way out to measure this?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 06 '14 at 18:33

If you want to measure the power consumption in you phone and if you can do it using hardware I would suggest this: http://www.adafruit.com/products/904

It's a Current and Voltage sensor board, easy to use with an Arduino board. I've used it to get fine grained values every 6ms.

PowerTutor need to be calibrated (using hardware or datasheet values) for each device if you want to be accurate.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 04 '12 at 21:31

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Check out Powertutor. It is in my experience the best application out there to measure power consumption. It is not 100% accurate but is good enough for estimations. You can categorize by 3G, CPU, Wifi.. etc.

answered Nov 04 '12 at 21:31

ishan

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i am trying powertutor, but on the its interface as well as th log files, there is no mention of WiFi power consumption. I ran ping and client server file transfer programs, but the GUI showed zero power consumption by wifi. – junaids May 28 '16 at 08:19

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Dec 05 '11 at 06:48

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You should read the value in /sys/class/power_supply/battery/batt_current.

That's the current consumption of the phone in mA. It's updated by the OS every minute or so.

edited Dec 05 '11 at 06:48

Reno

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answered Dec 05 '11 at 05:28

Todor Kolev

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Hi, as u had mentioned to use third party apps, I was interested to know, how apps like "Power Tutor" are able to measure power when there is no explicit API or software support. The current value of batter current and voltages are also updated after a minute or so in /sys/class/power_supply/ ...so then how does power tutor measure real time consumption of power by applications ? – Anonik Dec 09 '11 at 01:46

score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

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I don't think there is any such API to do this for WiFi. You'll have to use alternatives :

Use a multimeter/ammeter setup
Read the current value from the system
Buy some really expensive equipment designed specifically for this purpose
Use some third party apps that measure power

edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

Community

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answered Dec 05 '11 at 05:52

Reno

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Power consumption measurement for WiFi

4 Answers4