[maemo-developers] Power management is going to drive me mad!

[From: Simon Pickering]

> Is it possible on the N800 to programatically shut down the wifi
> interface and bring it back up?
> 
> I have an application that very occasionally needs network
> connectivity. If I leave my device connected to wifi, the battery dies
> too quickly. I would like to have the software turn on the wifi
> interface, do its thing, and then turn the interface off to conserve
> energy. I've considered other solutions, but I think this is the
> simplest answer.

If you change the settings to allow auto-connect it will automatically
connect whenever libconic (or whichever one it is) asks for a connection. To
get it to disconnect you can set the idle timeout to something suitably
short (5min I think).

This ought to work, though is perhaps not ideal if you have other apps which
will keep the connection busy once your chosen app has finished using it
(though you shouldn't really have any of these. Likewise if you have any
apps which try to connect more frequently, these will also be allowed and
might increase your power consumption.

I'd personally like to be able to specify connection intervals and then
allow all apps to use the connection for a specific time interval, without
worrying about whether it will idle for long enough to switch off, and
whether some other app will ask libconic to open a connection more
frequently than I want (e.g. connect every hour for 5 min, then disconnect
even if something is still using the connection). This would have to be done
at the libconic level, so that apps which call it were none the wiser.

I should add that this is not such a big issue with the N810 as it can quite
happily sit connected to the network (running ssh & sftp sessions) all
evening every day of the week without needing a charge.

Cheers,


Simon