Battery Drainer

BatteryDrainer is an android app aiming to drain your phone's battery as fast as possible. As simple as that! But why?

The idea behind this app is that every individual hardware component in a phone consumes an amount of power in order to function and consumes maximum power under maximum utilization. With this application we demonstrate the need for energy-efficient software and sustainable software engineering practices in battery-powered devices, like phones and tablets.

As of 2022, IT systems alone already consume 10% of global electricity and by 2030 it is estimated that, the Internet, data centers, telecommunication, and embedded devices will consume 1/3 of the global energy demand. Renewable energy is only a half solution. To address the root causes we need green IT and sustainable software engineering practices in order to reduce the energy need of data centers and cloud services worldwide [1].

Currently BatteryDrainer uses the following hardware features to drain the phone's batter:

• CPU - Threads doing expensive computations (SHA-512 hashes)
• GPU - Using OpenGL ES 2.0 to draw thousands of small rotating pyramids
• Camera - Using the CameraX API
• Hardware sensors - Utilizes all of the device's available sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity, etc.) using the highest possible sampling rate.
• Network - Repeatedly downloads a large file over the network (WiFi or Cellular network)
• GPS chip - Using precise location accuracy

[1] R. Verdecchia, P. Lago, C. Ebert and C. de Vries, "Green IT and Green Software," in IEEE Software, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 7-15, Nov.-Dec. 2021, doi: 10.1109/MS.2021.3102254.

The source code for this project is publicly available on our GitHub page https://github.com/S2-group/batterydrainer

MIT License - Copyright (c) 2022 Software and Sustainability Group - VU Amsterdam