Ciao,
this question is someway related to my previous one:
Quick wifi scan - Technical Support - Realtek Ameba IOT Developers Forum (RTL8722, RTL8195, RTL8710, RTL8720, BW16 Development board) - IOT / MCU Solutions 瑞昱開發者論壇 開發板 开發者论坛 开發板
I am evaluating RTL8720/RTL8722 for a project that requires extremely low power. My device would be sleeping most of the time, but needs to check wifi and do BT advertising at a relatively high frequency (checking wifi every 30-60’‘, advertising on BLE every 5-10’').
Deep sleep is out of the question because the 200ms overhead it has cancels the advantages in terms of power consumption. Light sleep is better, but I still need to understand how to optimize my code.
I am testing BLE, starting from the peripheral application. I see that BLE checks that wifi has been initialized. Do I need a full initialization of the whole wifi stack (wifi_on) to be able to use BLE? Is there a way to just turn on the radio part? I am asking because I see that the overhead for 200ms is around 700ms, between wifi and BT initialization…
Which steps of BLE initialization can I skip to save some time on wakeup?
The chip seems to fit our requirements in terms of cost and features, but being power-efficient is a major critical requirement too.
My understanding is that WiFi has master control of the radio, it is responsible for configuring it when turning on, which then allows BLE to send data when WiFi is not using it.
A full initialization of WiFi is probably not necessary, but I do not know what can be cut out.
As I mentioned in your other WiFi thread, your best bet would be an NDA to ask these questions to an FAE and/or to request for custom features, since the scope is beyond what I can see and answer.