I want to constantly send data to the iPod. But how can I do this when the iPod is in hibernation mode? If I disable the hibernation mode, then the batteries will be used up in the matter of hours.
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In short, you can't. The whole point of hibernation mode is to totally limit battery consumption in all ways and that includes turning off the WiFi radio.
What you can do is minimize power consumption; turn off the screen, use minimal CPU, etc...
However, I'm not versed in the ways of the APIs to know specifically what is possible.
Related
We would like to be able to play music in another tab (say YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, etc) and then stream that over a WebRTC connection to other peers.
We are doing this through the screenshare and it's mostly working, but the music will sometimes cut in and out for the listeners, giving it a choppy sound. In other words, it sounds smooth to the person sending it (ie sharing it from the originating URL), but it sounds choppy to the on the receiving side of the WebRTC connection.
Any thoughts on what might be causing this? Is this a buffering issue? If so, is it more likely buffering on the sending or the receiving side?
Thanks so much for any help!
WebRTC favors low latency over quality, with the goal of ensuring you can have normal speech communication. To do this, a lot of things happen to your audio:
Playback rate is constantly changed. If playback gets behind, the rate speeds up. If it's too far ahead, it slows down.
There is a very small buffer, creating more opportunities for the playback buffer run dry.
If packets are lost, the audio for their time is simply discarded... skipped over. Playback isn't likely to buffer a bit and then continue.
When audio is lost, a bit of a trail-off is synthesized. This is fine for speech, but sounds bad for music.
On the media capture end, there are also audio "enhancements" designed for dealing with bad webcam microphones which can sometimes be applied to other mediastreams if configured incorrectly. These include:
Echo cancellation
Noise reduction
Automatic gain control
Finally, it's usually the case that audio bitrates are quite low by default. You'll usually have to munge the SDP if you want stereo high quality audio.
All this to say, WebRTC might not be the right choice for you if you are concerned with quality. I often resort to the MediaRecorder API.
I am looking for a wireless communication technology for exchanging data between devices via sound in ultrasonic frequencies.It is possible to communicate with two mobile devices.I want to communicate a mobile and an embedded device.Is it possible?Any device is working with this protocol?
Of course it is possible. Back in the 1970's my TV remote control used ultrasound to change the channel and turn the TV off. The control was somewhat rudimentary IIRC a short press changed the channel up and a long press turned the TV off. It worked quite reliably for these functions.
Providing more functionality would require a more complicated modulation scheme which, as has been said in another answer, would be prone to interference from other sound sources. This probably explains why infra-red communucation signals are used in more modern remote control systems.
It is possible - why shouldn't it be? Smartphones are just embedded computers too. I imagine getting CE/FCC/etc certifications with such an embedded device will not be so easy. And production testing ...
But is it feasible? Probably not. Power consumption is a lot higher than with any RF-link, it's more susceptible to noise (quite literally) and the required components (microphone+speaker) are bigger than RF-components (antenna).
And then there's a whole bunch of other things you need to keep in mind when working with ultrasound, starting with the plastic design of the embedded device. But also things like the effect of ultrasound on people and their pets etc.
I know this is not directly programming related, but is there a way to purposely limit the signal strength on a testing mobile device to determine how your app performs under weak signal conditions?
I have an app that streams video and audio to a server, and need to test how it performs in low signal areas.. Any suggestions please?
One realistic way to do it is put it in a weak Faraday cage. You can make one or buy a bag or other pre-manufactured cage that protects against radio transmissions. As long as it's not too strong, it should weaken but not completely block the signal.
you can use a software like network link conditioner on OSX and netlimiter on windows, they have options for bandwidth limiting and even packet loss and presets for different typical situations plus the ability to create some yourself, you can just create a wifi network on your machine and connect to it from the device you want to test
please not that iOS has network link conditioner built-in (you can find it under the developer menu in settings), while android may have something on a rooted device (never tried anything though)
If run run your app in a simulator, many have options for emulating poor signal conditions.
There is at least one open source project whose aim is to simulate different network conditions for exactly the type of testing you are describing:
https://github.com/facebook/augmented-traffic-control
This can work in a cellular network but in this would most likely require your own base stations etc. This is possible via other open source projects (e.g. http://openbsc.osmocom.org/trac/), but is likely not necessary as you can probably simulate the same affect with the WiFi test set up.
Are there any "best practices" for writing a power-efficient background application in Symbian?
Specifically, is there any way (i.e. API) for a Symbian app to hint the OS regarding its current state in order to reduce battery consumption?
In Android, for instance, there is the notion of Wake Locks, which prevents the device from going into standby mode - Is there anything similar in Symbian?
EDIT:
Are there any implications when running code as a separate thread with the Open-C library, and not as "native" Symbian C++, using Active Objects etc.? (the Open-C code is blocking on IO most of the time).
You can check user (in-)activity with a RTimer::Inactivity() method. This way is described in Forum Nokia Wiki page. There it's also described how you can reset inactivity timer.
You can check whether device screen is turned on or off using HAL API. See classes HAL and HALData. You may use such a call:
TInt displayState;
HAL::Get(HALData::EDisplayState, displayState);
And the displayState will hold either 0 if display is turned off or 1 in other case.
With these APIs you will know whether user is active now, so you'll be able to change behavior of your background service to reduce its power consumption.
You can also use Nokia Energy Profiler application to record power consumption of handset, with different power saving options of your background service. Also please refer to Nokia's document describing best practices to save power of device. This document is quite straightforward, but useful nonetheless.
Hope this helps.
EDIT: About separate thread and Open C. As far as I know, Open C is just a plugin and deep down all the implementations are still "native Symbian". So, as far as you avoid periodic polling of some resource and just use usual blocking IO, your code is quite same economical on power as standard Symbian Active Objects techniques (which use Symbian-specific semaphores to block threads).
I have not come across anything special in Symbain to keep the device out of stand-by mode. Basically the "best practices" would be the same as all mobile devices:
Don't loop waiting for things, always use whatever signaling services avaialble on the platform, for Symbain ActiveObjects / User::WaitForXxx
Limit the number of background threads (currently all mobile devices are still only 1 CPU...)
Don't hang onto system services, close them ASAP (this is normally my main battery drain in my mobile applications, sometimes trying to find which system service causes the most battery drain can be a real pain, WinMo is very bad for this).
For me, I find that it mostly comes down to a tradeoff between battery life and performance / responsiveness for the application. Unfortunately power that be always seem to side with the performance / responsiveness side and damn the battery drain.....
Give your application low priority (see RProcess and RThread classes). Your approach will really depend on what your background application does. These things consume most battery: radio (GSM/3G/WIFI/BlueTooth), screen backlight, file accesses.
Symbian OS will always try to put your application to sleep, you don't need to tell it to do this. Just make sure your approach gives it the opportunity to put it to sleep.
Power management is an very most important issue while developing application.
In Symbian it depends on what you are using to run background activities .
Whether you are using Thread or ActiveX control.
For Eg. you are developing application browser that you want the browser to download something then that downloading activity should go in background and able activity starts and when to show progress and when it finishes it should again come to fore end.
It depends on how you are managing thread if you are using thread. You can do like which thread to pause when the long time taking activity starts and when to resume when background activity has finishes execution..
In fact this is the very good topic u have come across
There used to be an inactivity timer which could be reset by the application. This would prevent the screen from going into any screen saver mode.
If you use the various asynchronous function in Symbian, your app will run when appropriate.
One of these methods should work depending on your needs. If you describe what you want to achieve in more detail it would be easier to help you.
I had a look at this and this but no one sounded particularly sure of their ideas and I'm kind of after a different thing anyway. I want to hook my usb power cables (red and black) up to my phone so I don't have to use a battery (the battery is dead anyway and this is just an experiment). The problem is that USB standards ensure that a minimum of 4.35V is supplied, when I only want 3.7V. Does anyone know for sure that you can or cannot regulate power output programmatically? Some other queries I have are: What kind of power does the sleep mode provide? And what would I need to code something in to play with this, C++?
No, you won't find a computer that allows you to set this voltage in software. It would break the USB specification.
You can get 150mA by default, and 500mA if your USB device negotiates it with the computer (requiring a little bit of logic in the device). Multiply by 5V to get the provided power.
A bit more info on the answer from Pascal:
The normal operation (Non-Configured mode) is 100mA
In theory, the operating system should check the MaxPower value of the device's configuration descriptor to decide if to allow it to draw more than 100mA.
In practice, PCs do not do it (and have no way to control it). So you can try taking 500mA.
(Of course connecting a bus powered hub and linking more then one 500mA device, should, not work.)
If the device is not actively used, the OS may (and should) suspend it. When suspended the power is limited to 1-0.5mA (Again, in theory, since it can not be controlled by software).