PROJECTTINKER
[ 12 ]lab · simulations

Battery life / power budget

Build a duty cycle out of phases - active, Wi-Fi TX, light sleep, deep sleep - each with its own current and time, against a battery's usable capacity, self-discharge and a regulator's efficiency. Average current, and runtime in hours and days.

lab · sims · battery / power budget

Gear train →Ratio, direction, planetary. Stepper torque/speed →Pull-out torque curve. Thermal →Junction temperature and margin. Circuit basics →Ohm's law, dividers, LEDs, RC.

The budget [ live ]

current over one duty cycle
—runtime, days
—runtime, hours
—average current
—usable capacity
—self-discharge, as current
—nominal cell voltage

Duty cycle

Battery

Regulator

Assumptions and limits. Each phase's current is treated as the battery-side draw directly - the regulator's efficiency is applied as a flat divisor on every phase's current rather than modelling a separate load voltage, and its quiescent draw is added once as a constant. Self-discharge is folded in as an equivalent constant current (capacity × %/month ÷ hours/month), which is a fair approximation but not how real self-discharge behaves at the extremes of charge or temperature. Capacity fades with age and cold; none of that is modelled. Chemistry only sets the nominal voltage and a starting capacity guess - the capacity field is what actually drives the runtime number.