The recent post about adding some battery savings logic got a lot of mileage out of a very simple change – more than 10x lower average power consumption.

Warning: getting power consumption down can be an addictive puzzle!

Jörg Binkele was very helpful, and sent me a scope image, measuring the voltage drop over a 10 Ω resistor in the power line (before the regulator). Here are the first 5 seconds after powering up:

As expected, the node settles into a very low power mode most of the time, with an occasional blip once a second. FYI: one vertical division is 10 mA. The little horizontal bar at both ends is probably the trigger level.

One small surprise was the startup behavior. Well, that first 18 mA bump is really a very simple bug: in the first second when the timer is running and being polled, the node is not in low-power mode. Aha, of course – my power-down logic is at the end of loop(). Ok, trivial to change – just move the end of loop() to the beginning:

Yup, that seems to get rid of the 1 second hump @ 18 mA. Great. I don’t have an explanation yet for the initial 1.5 seconds, but I suspect that the RF12 driver is waiting in rf12_initialize() – there is still some oddness with RFM12B initialization after power-up. Oh well – that’ll be for another day.

But now it gets interesting – I told you it’s addictive! – the image above shows that each blip is ≈ 75 msec @ 18 mA. That’s when both the ATmega and the RFM12B are turned on.

Wait a minute. Why so long? Sure, the BMP085 needs to measure temperature and pressure, and that takes several tens of milliseconds. But why keep everything else running full throttle? There’s no need.

So I rearranged the core loop a bit, in a way where all major delays would be done with as much of the node’s hardware turned off as possible (bmp085demo.pde):

Here is the result, again courtesy of Jörg – and then annotated:

There’s lots of info here. Please note that the time scale is 25 times more detailed than the first scope image. The fun part is that you can essentially tie each power level to a line of code.

For example, the first hump is when the timer hasn’t yet reached 1000 milliseconds (since the watchdog can only take steps of at least 16 ms), so the node waits. But since it uses idle mode i.s.o. normal mode, power levels are about half of what an ATmega usually consumes. With almost no effect on the code. All we’re doing is switch off to wait for the next timer interrupt – that’s 50% of easily obtained savings.

Then there are two medium peaks when the ATmega starts the BMP085 measurements, and in between it drops back to power-down levels. Then we waste some power sending results out on the serial port (this could be removed). Lastly, when it’s time to transmit the readings, we switch on the radio, make sure it gets its job done, and then loop, again in power-down mode with the watchdog to keep us going.

If you look very closely, you can even see how long the BMP085 is busy with measuring temperature (about 4ms) and pressure (roughly 20 ms). Exactly according to specs.

The blip on the first screen is about 4 divisions on the second screen, and as you can see, the node is now asleep most of that time. That’s probably another 10-fold improvement. I wouldn’t be surprised if this node will now run a year or so on one set of AA batteries. And it’s still reporting once a second.

The moral is: match your reasoning to measured facts, and you can get a lot of power savings. Each case will be different, but it’s not rocket science.

Thanks Jörg, but please don’t send any more scope shots … I need to kick this addiction again! ;)

(Reminder: last day of the June special in the shop!)