Tablet battery drain while searching for MS?

[Map63Vette]

So I recently purchased a cheap 7" tablet to use as a secondary digital dash in my car and so far things are working out fairly nicely, though I have one concern. The battery on the tablet seems to work just fine while driving around plugged into the cigarette lighter, but when I turn the car off the MS drops the Bluetooth signal (as expected), but my tablet is technically still "awake" with the MSDroid software open and I can see it searching for the MS connection. I'm trying to get as close as I can to a "factory" style dash installation that will come on with key on and go off with key off. I can get there with Android and a switch 12 power source as I can set the display to stay on while plugged in (key on) and it will time out with the key off, but MSDroid is still working in the background trying to connect to the MS. Is there any way to force a "sleep" kind of mode on the tablet or MSDroid after so many seconds of inactivity? Would I then have to manually reconnect every time I turn the key on? The tablet will last for days sitting idle with no programs running, but if I leave it for a few hours with MSDroid open but the screen off it will suck the battery down 40%. I think the problem is MSDroid is trying to connect to the MS constantly and burning power, but without manually shutting it down every time I turn off the car I'm not sure how to fix it. Is there a setting somewhere in MSDroid that could help this?

[slow_hemi6]

I saw an app called autosleeper. I don't know if it is any good or not but it might be worth a look. It seems to be free, which is handy.

[Map63Vette]

Okay, I'll look into that one and see if it can do what I'm looking for. The tablet has been sitting on my desk for the better part of a week now and I don't know that it's even down to 75%, so I know it should be able to last in the car. I guess I need to keep closer tabs on the battery before and after trips to make sure it's doing what I think it's doing. I'm fairly sure the charge port I was using was pretty low power, so I suppose it's possible the tablet was just draining faster than it could get charged up. I'm going to power it off of a new radio now that has higher capacity charging, so that might help if it really is just a power issue.

[Map63Vette]

So this is somewhat related, but perhaps not quite the same question. I'm trying to get a better idea of how the MS connection is handled between devices. To me, the MSDroid app constantly has the "connecting" icon going in the upper corner when I key the car off. In my head I'm essentially seeing the app "knocking on the door" of the MS computer waiting for a response. However, the bluetooth is separately handled as the tablet and the MS adapter are paired and part of the system OS so to speak. I assume the MS computer doesn't freely broadcast its presence to connect to other devices, but rather is a passive component that waits until it sees a "request to connect" before doing anything. Just trying to figure out if there is a more efficient way for the MSDroid app to know when to "knock on the door" so to speak.

I plan to do some more testing to make sure it's actually the app burning CPU trying to talk to the computer, but this seems to make the most sense currently. A "smarter" auto-connect feature that waits until it sees some kind of "pairing" or connection over bluetooth, USB, or wifi, before trying to connect seems like it could fix the problem (if this is the problem), though I'm not 100% sure how the USB and wifi connections are handled.