I've done that a bit, but it'd still be nice to have exact
figures that we could use to determine a good estimate of
"How long can this baby run on one tank of gas?" (and yes,
I've been asked that quite a few times). The reason is that
sometimes clients (especially in our industry) avoid hooking
up a cradle and recharging the LI-Ion battery in the SPT 1700's,
thus running their units until they're all out of power, then
turning around and saying: "Hey, Palm says that these things
can run for weeks on one charge! Why is it only lasting for
a week!" (Because when you're supporting a laser scanner and
MSR, you're GOING to see some extra power drain. Especially
when you're scanning high volumes of barcodes and activating
your SPT on a more regular basis than some guy using a Palm V
to periodically write emails to his girlfriend or something...)
You can sense the bitterness...
But no, the best way I've found without exacting numbers is to
write the app, run it for an hour continuously (Lunch break works
great for this), cut out some bloat, test it some more, do some
Big O optimization (as you said, but on a greater scale), test it
some more, redo some logic, etc. Testing a few loops at a time is
just too tedious and time consuming, which means that you'd have
to sell your application at a higher price to cover your time, which
also means that you'd get lower sales (unless there's no
competition in your market).
-Rus
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Logie Urqhart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 8:46 AM
>To: Palm Developer Forum
>Subject: RE: power estimation
>
>
>One way to aid the design, is to write software of varying
>complexity (i.e
>simple display, loops, file access, intensive computations
>etc.) Use a few
>metrics on the code, and before running each program on the
>palm, note the
>battery level before and then after execution to determin the
>amout of power
>the app used.
>
>From the data it would be possible to estimate how much power
>an app will
>use based on its complexity.
>
>Hardware access would need to be sorted out through, e.g. how
>much power
>does the UART chip use when the port is open, sending, etc??
>
>Logie
>
>
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