N900 Hardware Power Consumption

This page contains information on the amount of energy used by each subsystem of the n900, and where applicable ways it can be reduced.

Much of any reduction will require additional software, some may be possible by altering user behaviour in ways that don't impact the users overall experience..

Measuring power usage is hard. For example - power consumption of the speakers/speaker-amp has to be disentangled from power consumption of reading a file from SD/emmc, decoding it, pulseaudios power use, and the DAC power use.


Below currents are from l3/l4 manual - assumed to be from a supply at 5V.

  • FMTX 19mA - l3/4
  • WLAN on - no powersave - 200mA
  • WLAN transmit 802.11b - 150mA

Battery parameters can be monitored thru fuel gauge asic TI BQ27200 [1]