How is Battery Life affected by the display

If you are curious to know how your game might affect the battery life of the Blinks, here is some data from empirical tests with production Blinks and the latest dev firmware to show how the display affects battery life.

CR2032 batteries range from 200-240mAh, they start at >3v and Blinks require batteries with at least 2.8v charge to operate (most coin cell batteries are at <10% capacity once they drop below this voltage)

The current drawn from a Blink is the best indicator of overall life, so here are two values that are quite helpful:

setColor(WHITE); has a current of 8.2mA
This suggests a 240mAh battery could run this sketch for ~30 hours

setColor(OFF); i.e. no display on, has a current of 3.2mA
This suggests a 240mAh battery could run this sketch for ~80 hours

Perhaps it is helpful to also add Red, Green, and Blue, however full brightness of any color is around 7mA and WHITE uses all three, so it felt like a good test to get the extremes.

We think it is good practice to use Blinks at full brightness whenever possible since they really sing when glowing brightly, but that brightness is also well supported by high contrast, so animating them bright and dim can help (I’m partial to the flashbulb effect).

Most of our games have Blinks at full brightness half of the time, some are a little more intensive than others. We arrive at our ~50 hours of gameplay by this measure, of course, depending on the game, you might be able to get even more.

Please update your Blinks to the latest Dev FW

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Please put this FW directly on all of your Blinks to make sure they use battery as responsible citizens in their cluster of the Blinkiverse.

I appreciate this kind of release note.

I thought it was odd that I was already in need of a new battery for one of my tiles… Thanks for the update!

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Yeah, you should have seen the shock on our face in the office when our pilot production of Blinks all dropped like flies :astonished: