Is it possible to make a electric imp based wifi beacon that only sends an outbound message. To make it super power efficient.
I hope someone can help me
The imp can sleep and wake 80,000+ times from 2xAA batteries (see the Nora reference design)… but that’s a message to the internet, which isn’t the same as (eg) an iBeacon.
What are you trying to do?
I want to make a wifi device that runs on a coincell. equal to a Tile blt tag. only wifi based so it can be detected by special equiped software routers.
I’m afraid that isn’t likely to work; coin cells cannot supply enough peak current to run WiFi (as wifi generally runs at much higher power levels than BTLE). Typical peak current from a coin cell is 30mA, but for 802.11b WiFi you’re generally looking at 250mA.
I know that wifi uses more power than a blt tag because they have different purposes.
A blt tag only wants to be found and just send’s a ping. The question is if we can create a chip that comes close to a blt tag be given it the exact same purpose.
Technically you could create a wifi “tag”, but as I said you could not use a coin cell, so it would have to use (eg) a CR2 cell which is quite a bit bigger.
With the imp the tag could check in with the imp agent regularly, reporting the BSSID it was connected to and the scan of wifi APs it can see. You can send this to google and get back a position (lat/long) from their geolocation database.
If the device failed to ping in a set period, you could use the agent to send an alert if you wanted to.