WLAN Pi Battery Testing

Man, I love this little guy.  I have mentioned it before, I will do it again…and again….and again.  It is so incredibly easy to drop on a network, see the IP pop up on the OLED and start iPerf3 to check network speeds, get speeds from ePerf in your  Ekahau site survey,  use a graphical speed test, use HORST to grab packets, launch Kismet to see the WLANs around, have an endpoint for WiFi Explorer Pro, or add anything else a Raspberry Pi can run to customize it.  I’ll follow up with the junk I have added to mine at a later date.

One shortcoming of the current crop of Single Board Computers, including the one used in the WLAN Pi, is the lack of real PoE.  Some can use the phony bologna “passive PoE”  a certain prosumer WiFi vendor uses, but who has time for such nonsense?   You end up having to either use a USB PoE splitter or add a hat to the device.  Bummer.  The nice thing is that they draw very little power.  One great way to pop one up quickly is to just use a USB battery pack.  Rather than dealing with the splitters or finding wall power, I’ve found the battery pack to be a quick and easy solution.  I carry one anyway, and my bag is pretty full, so why not use it?  I like everything possible in my backpack to have at least two uses.  I don’t have any other reason to carry a USB PoE splitter.

I have amassed many of these battery packs over the years as charging technologies have changed.  I harbor a mild obsession with using the fastest possible charging technology for my current phone.  Most recently that is the Pixel 2 XL, which uses USB Power Delivery as does my Macbook.  The battery packs I used are specifically because I am most likely to have one of them in my bag (I also obsessively re-organize my bag so it can change depending on the day).  I hope to test with some others if I can pull them from my son’s hands.

First the setup – I used a WLAN Pi running  WLAN Pi v1.3 (Released 06-03-2018).  I had the Comfast CF-912AC in it, plugged into one of my Aruba switches.  I booted it and immediately started Kismet to make sure the WLAN adapter was being used.  I then started a ping from one of my servers with a timestamp (used this on Windows) and let it sit and cook.

The first battery I tested was my light and quick one.  It’s an Auckley (not to be confused with Auckey) 10,000 mAh pack that is actually pretty slim.  Now that I have a phone with a decent battery I carry it with me most of the time.  It’s just a little oomph if I am in a single meeting and need to make sure I have enough juice.  It is USB-PD and works fairly well for a generic. It was one of the only PD packs on the market for quite a while, so I went with the generic.  Most that do PD are gigantuon (like the second one I tested).

So, the Auckley actual gave me 14 hours 22 minutes of use!  If you need to be running this thing for THAT long straight, you’ve got big issues.  REALLY impressive.  These things sip power through a Capri Sun straw.

The second battery was my big daddy (he loves it when you call him Big Papa).  The RavPower 26,800 mAh is a BEAST.  This is the one I carry on planes or when I am going to be in meetings all day.  As one would expect, it lasted an amazingly long time.  I got 32 hours and 13 minutes out of it, using the same testing!

Mathing out the draw vs the capacity of the battery is one thing.  As you can see testing with all the variables is quite another.  I hope this helps give a feel for how long you can run these amazing little devices on the battery pack you probably already have with you!

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