Doesn’t a modern smartphone have something like a 4000 mAH battery? And that lasts most people all day with room to spare? Even 100 mA every few minutes will get noticed, if someone has their phone off and expecting consumption to stay minimal.
And that’s the key thing here, you’re not just building a tracking platform but you are building it into commodity phone hardware without the users consent, and without them noticing. Any phone that burns that much power while off would likely get replaced by the user. Do you think the phone vendors are in on it?
It’s not 100mA every few minutes, it’s 100mA when calibrating from scratch with no satellites known.
I looked it up and the consumption when in normal use is around 30mA, which would mean that, say, if it took 10 seconds (probably a lot more than needed if you’re not travelling) every 5 minutes - which adds up to 120 seconds @ 30mA per hour - that would consume 1mA/h (PS: by pure absolute chance my numbers ended yielding a result of 1 ;)), which is 0.025% of that battery per hour. If you’re lucky, in the phone screen were one would be visualizing the graph for the battery power charge over time that would make the line fall 1 pixel.
It really is a whole other world out there in the embedded and low power systems domain.
Doesn’t a modern smartphone have something like a 4000 mAH battery? And that lasts most people all day with room to spare? Even 100 mA every few minutes will get noticed, if someone has their phone off and expecting consumption to stay minimal.
And that’s the key thing here, you’re not just building a tracking platform but you are building it into commodity phone hardware without the users consent, and without them noticing. Any phone that burns that much power while off would likely get replaced by the user. Do you think the phone vendors are in on it?
It’s not 100mA every few minutes, it’s 100mA when calibrating from scratch with no satellites known.
I looked it up and the consumption when in normal use is around 30mA, which would mean that, say, if it took 10 seconds (probably a lot more than needed if you’re not travelling) every 5 minutes - which adds up to 120 seconds @ 30mA per hour - that would consume 1mA/h (PS: by pure absolute chance my numbers ended yielding a result of 1 ;)), which is 0.025% of that battery per hour. If you’re lucky, in the phone screen were one would be visualizing the graph for the battery power charge over time that would make the line fall 1 pixel.
It really is a whole other world out there in the embedded and low power systems domain.