Rally RK210 travel mode and battery life

if the travel time 2h then maximum 2h minus from the battery life. but usually lot less, it wont be active 100%, just when movement detected (depending where is your bike/pedals during a trip) . i am using this mode with other powermeter if i am driving 10+ hours per day with car and the bike is in the cargo space and it is multiday trip. for shorter trips, never (ok, it has only 90hs life, mine has almost 200hs, but i think the 90h is more than enough if you charge it fully at home. i need also usb cable and a charger to switch back to normal mode my pm, so it is a common method, Assiomas need also the charger to switch back to normal mode). 

i assume this travel mode is designed for flights, where you must turn off all electric devices, even in the luggage.

According to the manual powering the pedals from USB is the designated way to exit travel mode.  It is not a workaround.

When I am driving with the bike on the bike rack my phone connects to the pedals even at stop lights or sitting in traffic.  I can see it connected from the connect app. I put it in travel mode to stop the battery drain. I didn't notice this with the older rally XC200 pedals.  I equate this to keeping the SRAM AXS battery connected to my read derailleur while driving.  It will drain the battery life while transporting. 

It is hard to think of what the mechanism for that would be.  There are no buttons on the pedals, and if the accelerometers are turned off then no amount of twiddling the pedals will bring them back to life.   The current approach seems like a good solution to preserving the battery without a lot of complexity.

But let's say that to wake them up it involved a specific number of turns in one direction and then the other say, which would be unlikely to happen during travel, the accelerometers would have to be active all the time.  That would defeat the purpose of travel mode somewhat.

Alternatively let's say there was another sleep mode where the pedals could still be woken up by the phone but not by rotating the pedals. The radio would have to be turned on periodically for this.  The Tempe sensor is an example of this which is more feasible and uses very little power but the hardware would have to support being able to just turn on the Bluetooth LE side of the radio periodically and allow it to wake up the rest of the hardware.   If the current hardware doesn't have this capability (why would it?) then this mode couldn't be implemented by a software update alone. It would require a hardware revision to the RK210 which seems unlikely.   Maybe they'll implement it in the RK220?   

On the other hand when would you not have access to USB power?  You don't even need a charger.  You can plug the power cable into your phone and set the phone to output power over USB-C to wake up the pedals

Why does your phone connect to the pedals? remove the pairing , and will be fine, it is not a smartwatch that needs continous BT connection. (if you wanna check is there any new firmware for them, pair-check-unpair, and thats all)

My ROTOR power meter didn't have this problem during transport. When I added sufficient torque the PM woke up. The potential to lose the charging adapter at a trail head because of the need to wake it up is one of my concerns.  I've done it twice already.  It's a hassle to pull out my charging block and connect it to the pedals.

I was a bit surprised when I saw the adapters for the first time.  I thought Garmin would use a magnetic connection but maybe they can't because Apple invented it and won't licence it to Garmin?  At least they avoided using the type of connector on their watches which is problematic.

From the manual, the phone need to be paired to connect to the pedals to put them in travel mode. I have the pedals paired via BLE to get the cycling dynamics with secure connection. Bluetooth connects automatically with the phone.

the adapters are magnetic.