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We (Spire, building breath tracking wearables) have an unfortunate amount of experience troubleshooting these issues. The developer tooling around measuring bat

by matsur 11y ago

We (Spire, building breath tracking wearables) have an unfortunate amount of experience troubleshooting these issues. The developer tooling around measuring battery drain/energy usage is not useful for debugging this sort of thing. We ended up wiring a disassembled iPhone to battery simulation hardware and are now able to measure battery drain while stepping through a debugger/pushing the phone through an integration test to identify power usage regressions. Curious how other folks handle these issues.

X-Istence 11y ago
This is actually really neat, do you guys have a blog post detailing how you do this?
mey 11y ago
I remember a presentation by Amazon at AnDevCon describing a similar setup they use internally as part of their validation. The built in Android battery profile wasn't sufficiently accurate to what was actually causing drain (most OEMs don't modify the default AOP power profile to represent what their system components actually consume in power). They actually went to the point to connecting into the battery electronics on the battery side to monitor drain. Unfortunately I don't see the presentation available online and this was at least 4 years ago.
- cma 11y ago
  Recent talk by John Carmack mentioned the same, in their case they hooked up a measured DC power supply in place of the battery to measure power usage for GearVR
barkingcat 11y ago
At mozilla - for B2G battery drain issues there is a project for building battery harnesses - the work of one man working in low level power measurements https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/04/measuring-power-consumption-on-phones/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/04/measuring-power-consumptio...
CamperBob2 11y ago
Curious how other folks handle these issues. One approach might be to use a thermometer or IR camera to keep track of the phone's temperature relative to ambient. If something is causing unusual amounts of battery drain, the phone is going to get (much) hotter.

by matsur 11y ago

X-Istence 11y ago

This is actually really neat, do you guys have a blog post detailing how you do this?

mey 11y ago

I remember a presentation by Amazon at AnDevCon describing a similar setup they use internally as part of their validation. The built in Android battery profile wasn't sufficiently accurate to what was actually causing drain (most OEMs don't modify the default AOP power profile to represent what their system components actually consume in power). They actually went to the point to connecting into the battery electronics on the battery side to monitor drain. Unfortunately I don't see the presentation available online and this was at least 4 years ago.

cma 11y ago
Recent talk by John Carmack mentioned the same, in their case they hooked up a measured DC power supply in place of the battery to measure power usage for GearVR

barkingcat 11y ago

At mozilla - for B2G battery drain issues there is a project for building battery harnesses - the work of one man working in low level power measurements https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/04/measuring-power-consumption-on-phones/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/04/measuring-power-consumptio...

CamperBob2 11y ago

Curious how other folks handle these issues. One approach might be to use a thermometer or IR camera to keep track of the phone's temperature relative to ambient. If something is causing unusual amounts of battery drain, the phone is going to get (much) hotter.