Power consumption of birdnetpi on various Raspberry Pi models

[Malario95]

Hello birders, I’ve got Birdnetpi running on a Raspberry Pi 4B and on two 0W2 units. Each setup fits inside a birdhouse, with the microphone sticking out. I’m planning to try using the devices without a fixed power supply, just with a power bank. That’s why I’d love to hear about your real-world experiences.

My first test with the 0W2 yielded a runtime of ~48 hours on a 20,000mAh power bank. So, if you factor in the conversion losses from 3.7V to 5V at the power bank, the actual power consumption should have averaged around 1.2–1.3 watts.

The Pi had a small no-name USB micro connected to it; Wi-Fi was switched on but there was no network within range, and the setup was in a garden directly bordering a forest, so there were plenty of detections.

I look forward to hearing about your experiences and figures, perhaps also with the other models, so we can compile a list. Tips are always welcome, of course.

[gitmatt19]

I've been working on "headless" mode so I can run these remotely for at least days.
Are you powering down wifi, bluetooth and all of the extra birdnet services not needed for just recording and analyzing ?
Other power lowering considerations ?

I have noticed the USB microphone dongle used can vary power draw by up to 10ma too.

I also have an RTC module on mine so it does not lose time when out.

[BucksterUK]

48 hours is very impressive on 20,000mAH power bank

I have a Pi4b 4gb version - running a Clippy EM272m mic via an Apple audio dongle

I have tried undervolting and underclocking to extend battery life and have noticed very little difference to the results below:

10k power bank - 12 hours
20k power bank - 24 hours
26.8k power bank - 1 day 12 hours

as you'd expect very linear vs capacity

number of detections Winter vs Summer (high number) doesn't seem to make much difference either

[nickds1]

Interesting.
Logically, BirdNET-Pi is processing chunks every 3 seconds independently of the number of IDs actually made - the only extra energy cost is in a DB write if there's a hit, which of course can be some 1,000s a day and SD cards are quite power hungry. I wonder if there would be a way of caching writes in RAM and only writing back every, say, hour? Yes, on power fail you'd lose a bit, (30 mins on average) but you'd save a chunk on the uSD card.
Dropping all unused peripherals would be essential.

You could argue that a headless BirdNET-Pi with all peripherals powered down except the uSD card is essentially an over-qualified power-hungry AudioMoth! You need WiFi or the LAN enabled for there to be any point in using BirdNET-Pi at all... and if you have a LAN connection, you could use PoE...