Estimote LTE Beacon is fully programmable using JavaScript. This opens up a whole new world of opportunities. However, with great power comes great responsibility.
There are certain principles you need to adhere to, in order to fully realize the potential of this versatile and powerful device.
In this article, we talk about the mechanisms we’ve incorporated into the design of the LTE Beacon to maximize its efficiency. We also offer a handful of tips that will help you optimize your code and avoid pitfalls that could lead to issues like excessive battery usage, and generally ensure efficient use of the LTE Beacon’s limited resources.
Familiarizing yourself with these limitations and following the principles outlined in the guide is an important first step to creating a successful solution using Estimote LTE Beacons.
Estimote LTE Beacon programming principles
Below are four programming principles to bear in mind when creating your micro-app for Estimote LTE Beacon.
- Use an action-reaction approach to minimize energy consumption
In order to limit current consumption, low power devices usually turn off most of their components, leaving only essential modules powered up. When an event occurs (a button is pressed or a timer fires), they quickly turn on the required peripherals, carry out an action, and then switch the component off again (a.k.a. ‘sleep mode’). Following this pattern, a micro-app should not be running all the time. Instead, it should register itself to different kinds of events happening within the device like:
- timers
- button presses
- acceleration change
- radio communication
- BLE scanning
Ideally, your micro-app should handle events as quickly as possible, allowing the device to go to sleep as soon as possible. Your micro-app can be more power-efficient if you take an approach that includes registering for events or using timers. This is why the API has no delay function — without it, only these power-conscious approaches are possible
- Make sure your micro-app runs only once
Your micro-app’s main code block should be executed only once, when the app is installed, or when the device starts up. The code should configure the device (set the advertised BLE packets, for example) and register all the necessary event handlers.
- Limited execution time
Every millisecond of running your app’s code is a millisecond of relatively high energy consumption. To minimize it, the device places a 10s hard limit on the execution time of your code.
In practice, when a piece of code runs for too long, an exception will be thrown and your app will stop. This applies only to code written by the user. The execution of API functions will not be affected, because of their predictability.
These limitations are intended to prevent excessive energy consumption, as well as to decrease the risk of accidentally creating an infinite loop.
- Periodic communication
Long distance communication is power-consuming. It involves both transmitting and receiving data packets, data encoding, link establishment, fault recovery, etc. In most cases, transmitting user data can be done quickly (in about 1-2 seconds), but the preparation time can be quite long (up to over 15 seconds). In order to limit overall energy consumption, the LTE Beacon follows a set of rules:
- communication is initiated by the LTE Beacon — it can analyze incoming signals (timers, button-presses, accelerometers, etc.) and choose to begin transmission when necessary.
- all communication is carried out in a single synchronization window during which the device turns on its modem and sends all the data packets at once.
- The data is kept in persistent storage for synchronization — the app can queue a number of small data packages and then send them all at once.
You can trigger the synchronization window manually, but calling it too frequently will drain the battery quickly.
The synchronization window is also a time when the device checks for any incoming messages, such as user data, a new app waiting to be uploaded, or firmware updates. This means that data pushed to the device will wait in the Cloud until the device wakes up and downloads it.
We hope you found this article helpful. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback! You can reach us at contact@estimote.com