I recently purchased the M5Stack ATOM Echo Smart Speaker Dev Kit together with the M5Stack ATOM TailBat battery.
However, I am not satisfied with the battery life so far.
In my test, the TailBat lasted a maximum of about 1 hour — during that time I performed around 20 voice inputs and voice outputs. After that, the battery was completely drained.
I was honestly expecting a significantly longer runtime.
Has anyone had similar experiences or any tips on how to improve the battery life?
Unless you are aggressively using sleep mode and power management, your ESP32 is going to love eating batteries. Read the data sheets is my first suggestion.
Quite expected.
Your battery has nominal capacity of 190mAh and <90% of that can be used before protection cut-out.
It boosts the battery voltage to 5V, which Echo voltage regulator burns down to 3.3V.
So your Esp has ~150mAh available, one hour at normal 150mA draw if no sleep cycles are applied.
Slightly off-topic, but is anyone if considering using an M5 Atom S3 with a TailBat as a “wireless” Bluetooth proxy, it probably won’t work very well. Bizarrely this is because the TailBat automatically switches off when power drain drops below a certain level, and the S3 doesn’t draw enough power to keep it on.