How to decrease AWS IoT button press delay before message publishing?

Question

I am using two AWS IoT buttons to increment a scoreboard. The system works, but there is about a 5 second delay from the button being pressed to until the message from the button is actually published to AWS, which makes the scoreboard less responsive than I would like.

I'm having trouble finding information about this delay between the initial button press and the message being published. I think I remember seeing in the documentation or on a blog that the delay exists to prevent an accidental double tap from being recorded, but I haven't been able to find where I read that.

I have two questions:

1. Is there any documentation or explanation of this delay that I'm missing?
2. Is it possible to change this delay? Or is this built in to IoT buttons?

Answer 1

More realistically, this delay encompasses the time to register on the wifi network.

In order to minimize power consumption (that's an officially irreplaceable battery) the device is normally completely dormant - it cannot afford the energy cost of maintaining a wifi network connection, and instead only starts trying to obtain one after the button has been pushed and it has traffic to send.

Comparatively speaking, five seconds to wake up, authenticate and transmit a message is fairly reasonable.

If you want something faster, you'll probably have to look at a different technology for the first "hop" from battery to mains powered infrastructure - perhaps propriety 2.4 GHz RF where you can simplify the association process. Or provide a power source which can accommodate a system that maintains a connections even when not being actively used.