[quote=“bkurtz, post:1, topic:180732”]Hello everyone,
While I realize the iPhone Locator will pull power to poll the location of the device, I think something may be haywire with the dynamic mode that is causing more power than I would expect. My wife and I both have 5s devices, and after enabling dynamic mode with the setting 0:600,1:60,10:300,20:600,100:3600, I had extreme power usage. Normally I could make it a thru a day and have 25% left during the weekday, and maybe 50% on the weekends when I had less little usage. When I turned on the app, I would get down to say 70% or so by 10am or so (unplugging at 7am) and by 2 or 3 in the afternoon would be down into the 20%. I kept it as is for a week while i fiddled with other settings, and finally after disabling the app our battery life went back up.
I really wonder if the dynamic mode is working like I expect? I have the setting above at 100:3600 because I travel a lot and I don’t want my phone to get blown up when I’m traveling. I spent 3 days in over 1000 miles away and had basically the same battery usage, although the setting should have pinged me just once an hour. That should consume almost no power.
Does this seem normal or am I missing something? I’m running 1.8. This really is a great, well done app but I think something simple is off…
Brian[/quote]
if you have 5 devices in the same iCloud account, then you need to be aware that the polling period is managed by the “root” device which is the one holding the iCloud communication , then each devices declared in the iCloud account have their own corresponding VERA “child” devices showing up in UI5 but you will see that only the root device - the one with (*) in the name, is having iCloud parameters in its setti,ng tabs. this is used so that iCloud is polled only ONCE to get the information about ALL devices of the iCloud account
However one major drawback is that the polling frequency is determined based in the smallest of ALL the polling period theorically required by all the devices in this iCloud account based on the dynamic mapsettings. Thus, out of your 5 devices if a single one is at a close distance from your home , let’ say 5 km, then the 60sec polling frequency is selected and this applies to ALL devices ! 0:600,1:60,10:300,20:600,100:3600
Workaround strategies include the followings:
- seperate your devices into different iCloud accounts ( not very practical )
- remove locatioin services from devices on which you do not want to be polled
- filter out unneeded devices from your vera plugin setting configuration, determine exactly which devices you want to track ( avoid all, like iPads staying at home …) and select them specifically in the right hand list list box of the settings.
- you can also create a different VERA root device for each of them and have a seperate different polling period/ polling map for each but still you ll be limited by the hard fact that polling an iCloud device , will make apple poll each devices! so poll only what you need and at the smallest frequency possible. Every time a device approaching its base ( and thus increasing dynamic frequency ) will impact all devices