Bluetooth power draw

I am considering doing the bluetooth hack but since (as I understand it) there is no way of turning the bluetooth adapter off, I am concerned about the amount of power the adapter draws and its effect on my already poor battery life.

Does anyone have any figures or even a good guess as to the potential impact on battery life of having a bluetooth adapter permanently wired in?

 

Get a low power Bluetooth unit (one of the 10m range ones range than 100m) and I believe the current draw will be around 60-80mA when idle, so 0.3-0.4W, shouldn't really make a noticeable impact on battery life. There's a thread somewhere that details the current draw of the AAO under various conditions.

 

put the device into a windoze machine and check out the property pages in control panel > system > hardware device manager.

it will show how much power it is drawing

 

I just did the bluetooth mod and installed the application disc that come with the BT transmitter, it does allow you to shut down the bluetooth. Here is what I get.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.11825

 

Thanks for the helpful information. This tells me what I need.

Thanks also for the suggestion about the software but as I am running Linux, this probably won't help me much.

 

i have a 6600 mah battery now, so its not that much of a prob, but i am slightly concerned about it. if i wanted to mount a switch on this (and othe rplanned mods going through usb, touchscreen etc) could i just put it between the +5v point and the device?
Rory

 

Sorry this is so off-topic but...

Rory, you posted one of my favourite bits of the fantastic 2008 F1 season (seeing my avatar, it probably doesn't surprise you to know I'm an F1 fan). I feel sorry for Massa, he drove well all season but I don't like Ferrari much and the look on the Ferrari team's faces when they realised Lewis had steamed past Timo Glock was priceless.

Go Lewis, may this be the first of many.

Your normal service has now been restored, back to the Aspire One (and apologies to any Massa fans out there).

 

Did anyone try to de solder the LED on the USB dongle, and check the difference in power draw?

Wonder if it will work after removing the LED.

 

You can turn the device off through windows in device manager.
The device will be in a very very very low power state which is the same as "off".

 

I meant on de-soldering the LED diode (the blue one) found on the circuit board of bluetooth dongle. Is it sane?

 

I was talking to the person a couple post above yorus.
Anyways... LED on bluetooth dongle draw about 0.0001W of power.. so don't worry about it. Desoldering it might give you 1/100th second more battery run time.

 

Thanks for the info?

But, on the funny side, don't you just hate if something is blinking inside your precious and you did nothing to stop it?

 

here's my experience if this helps... I have a cirago micro bluetooth adapter. I use it to tether to my cell phone. When I do this and wifi off I get 10-15 minutes longer battery life than without my bluetooth adapter installed and using wifi. This is with the 3 cell battery. Using my bluetooth mouse doesn't seem to have any noticeable affect on battery life. So I assume if its just "listening" or idle you won't notice any difference