Tracker temperature and power usage

[sjobeek]

I was quite surprised by how hot the eye tracker can get after a few minutes of use, especially when actively tracking. Not quite hot enough to burn, but warmer than is comfortable to hold in your hand.

The tracker does also keep quite warm when the server is not actually delivering coordinates. The tracker must be using quite a bit of power in order to output that much heat; it makes me wonder how badly it will affect battery life of a laptop / tablet.

A few questions:
1) Is this normal, expected behavior?
2) Are there any optimizations that could be done to reduce power consumption while the tracker is in the "connected-to-server-but-not-tracking" state?

[Martin]

Hi Sjobeek,

Like most electronics it does get warm but in my experience not so much that you cannot hold it. When the (all) clients have disconnected the sensor and the IR emitters are turned off. It goes into a standby mode and turns back on once a client connects. In this mode it does not generate heat.

Perhaps in your case it's possible that the heat is transferred from the laptop onto the device. I've notice this especially on the Mac Pro which have the fan outlet just below the screen (facing upwards, not backwards). It will certainly make the device hot.