I wrote previously that it is hard to reach the EXIT / AUSGANG gates at the embedded world trade show in Nuremberg and not have a few demo or dev kits in your sponsored rucksack. That’s why the show is a must-attend for serious electronicists of all ages. I consider myself one but this year I was unable to attend the show and what do you think, I still I received a kit — it simply arrived in the mail a few days later. It is the Otii Arc Demo kit from IoT developers Qoitech in Sweden hence the polar bear on the box. On the Arc box proper I saw “Sony Belgium” printed.

Test and measurement, signal processing with mixed analogue and digital means and anything connected to a laptop via the USB are dead certs when comes to arousing my technical curiosity. So I left the usual stack of ST and TI microcontroller boards to my fellow reviewers here on Elektor e-zine and decided to do a quick review of a piece of equipment that’s supposed to answer that perennial question: What’s draining my battery? and how can I get help from fellow engineers in the community to identify and slam the culprit.

If you think there isn’t a problem, (1) do an estimate of the number of low-power IoT devices both around on the globe and in development and (2) read Thomas Scherer’s "Data Logger Hack" story on a personal hunt for an elusive battery-killer in his Toyota Prius. Thomas, this one’s for you.