Question from Predictive Maintenance Webinar 29th of April: Energy consumption is really a challenge, is Wifi connection really suited for this application ?

[Vladimir JANOUSEK]

Yes, wifi is not the best suitable RF solution for battery operated products. Many industrial applications are using BLE instead. It is also matter of how often you really switch ON the wifi module in your application, if it is once per day / week / month, wifi consumption becomes less critical. For STWIN we support both: BLE directly at STWIN and wifi through an additional expansion board = STEVAL-STWINWFV1 .

[RJain.1]

Hi @Community member​ ,

Can you please tell me what is the max power consumption of STWINKT1 kit while using BLE. Like if I want to send the vibration data once in a Hour, then how much power will be consumed by this kit?

[Vladimir JANOUSEK]

This question is not easy to answer since the consumption is a dynamic matter and depends on many factors - which sensors are active, which fmw is running and is activated on the STM32 etc.. In general, for example the power consumption when you are not measuring and even not communicating over BLE can be as minimum value as IIS2DH consumption which could be used to wake up the whole unit from movement with only microamps of current consumption + stby current from other components on the board. After that you can enable the STM32 and BLE communication and even IIS3DWB and at that moment (once per hour) the average current consumption can be significantly higher, in 10 mA range depending how you collect the data and what you calculate in STM32. Best way could be to implement this in STWIN by modifying the example source code and then to measure the current from the battery line. We do not have handy measurements done currently and to optimize the system for power optimal performance was not our prime goal in our examples.