Battery autonomy management

10 steps to manage the autonomy of your Industrial tablet.

Did you know it? 10 steps to manage the autonomy of your Industrial tablet.

- The initial situation:

Whether your tablet is Windows or Android, the first step is to analyze current consumption.

There are a number of apps on both platforms that allow this to happen.

Once the analysis has been performed by a third-party application, do not forget to uninstall it. Indeed the latter is itself very energy intensive.

- Adjust the backlight of your screen:

Even if they are based on LED technology, they can reduce battery life by 50%. The manual brightness adjustment allows you to precisely define the average visual comfort, which is generally between 20 and 30% of the maximum capacity.

Professional equipment has a light sensor that adjusts the backlighting according to the lighting environment. This constantly working sensor consumes your battery. Unless the management is manual

- Wireless:

Industrial tablets have more or less wireless functions such as Wifi, NFC, RFID, 4G etc. It is not a problem to deactivate the contactless functions between two uses. What is less known is that the WiFi and 4G settings can be fine-tuned by their respective application or directly in the driver provided by the manufacturer. This is the setting for the "aggressiveness" function. It allows consumption to fluctuate by 30%. It is therefore important to find and define the right setting.

- Geolocation :

No secrets, weather, photos, road traffic, etc ... the GPS chip is in constant demand, in industrial use, deactivating the GPS guarantees extended battery life. If Windows knows perfectly well how to cut the energy of this chip, Android keeps it on permanent standby in order to stay in contact with the satellites and provide a position to any application that requests it.

- Applications :

They are more and more present in memory. They are called residents, they stay in memory while you no longer needed the application they depend on, sometimes to spy on you, sometimes to check for updates, etc.

they are often numerous, and appreciably increase the “basic metabolism” of your tablet, your processor is at 5.10 or even 20% of performance and your memory occupied at 30 or 40% while you do nothing…. So it takes a lot of energy to ... nothing.

- The Widjets:

These are those little apps or living icons on your home page, seemingly harmless, and very useful for viewing weather or news for home use, of little interest in the industry. Nevertheless, they geolocate you, consume Wifi, processor, memory, in short a concentrate of all the points already discussed.

- Screen cutoff:

As we saw above, the screen is the biggest consumer of energy. By default, industrial equipment behaves like consumer products, turning off after 5 to 15 seconds of inactivity.

These seconds put end to end quickly represent wasted minutes. Industrial tablets are equipped with one or more programmable buttons that can be dedicated to voluntarily turning off screen light. The tablet remains functional, the screen lights up at the touch of a button, like a switch.

- Energy profiles:

Very successful on Windows, the creation of an energy profile corresponding to each individual's use makes it possible to manage the priorities of energy flows.

Indeed, there is no need to put your equipment on functional alert while you are reading a PDF or a .doc, reducing the frequency of the processor or the range of the wifi are strategic decisions in energy management.

- The batteries :

Power outage or battery failure? Industrial shelves are equipped with removable batteries. The most efficient even allow them to be replaced without turning off the tablet. Power failure therefore becomes very easy to avoid as long as the physical management of the batteries is well managed, without ever interrupting mobility. The power cable puts your equipment on a leash. Several batteries, external chargers are the key elements in maintaining mobility.

- Loaded and unloaded.

Your batteries are alive, they are born, live and die. Like our bodies, our batteries need to be spared. The maximum performance of a Lithium battery is between 60 and 30% of charge, between these values ​​the variation is rapid.

It is strongly advised not to use your equipment while charging a battery, as well as to subject it to extreme cycles, pushing at 100% charge and 100% discharge is very bad for the chemical components of the battery.

In summary, the deployment of industrial mobile equipment requires a good knowledge in the configuration of operating systems, whether for information security or as in this subject, for the design and implementation of a configuration. energetic. These decisions are made when designing a master's degree, and the choice of their options is decisive for a successful user experience.