  Recent advances in cloud computing have simplified the way that both software
development and testing are performed. Unfortunately, this is not true for
battery testing for which state of the art test-beds simply consist of one
phone attached to a power meter. These test-beds have limited resources,
access, and are overall hard to maintain; for these reasons, they often sit
idle with no experiment to run. In this paper, we propose to share existing
battery testing setups and build BatteryLab, a distributed platform for battery
measurements. Our vision is to transform independent battery testing setups
into vantage points of a planetary-scale measurement platform offering
heterogeneous devices and testing conditions. In the paper, we design and
deploy a combination of hardware and software solutions to enable BatteryLab's
vision. We then preliminarily evaluate BatteryLab's accuracy of battery
reporting, along with some system benchmarking. We also demonstrate how
BatteryLab can be used by researchers to investigate a simple research
question.
