One of the really fun things I always like to work on, is to push the envelope on power savings in the JeeNode.

It all started long ago, but over the years, I did refine the measurement process as my insight and instruments both got better. Here’s the most primitive approach, inserting a multimeter in series with the power supply to measure the static current consumption:

The big problem with this is that a multimeter is far too slow to really see what’s going on. Only static idle current can be measured this way.

Another approach was to use a second JeeNode as power consumption tracker with some extra circuitry, to measure the voltage drop repeatedly:

This design can capture spikes by performing lots of repeated measurements, and in this particular case it even had a fairly large measurement range of 1 µA to 60 mA. This was done by using two separate sensing circuits and switching between them as needed.

But the real breakthrough came mid 2010, when Jörg Binkele sent me an oscilloscope snapshot of the voltage over a small series resistor. Here is one of the last ones, after lots of power saving techniques had already been applied:

As you can see from the annotations, there is an incredible amount of information one can glean from such oscilloscope traces.

This was one of the main reasons for me to learn more about oscilloscopes and eventually to buy a modern one myself – as described in a couple of posts, such as this one.

The capabilities of a modern digital storage oscilloscope (DSO) are truly phenomenal – and much of it is not even that much affected by the actual price range, although their cost does tend to keep them out of reach for occasional hobby use.

After many days of tinkering, it became possible to produce a very detailed map of the current consumption of a sensor acquisition + packet transmission cycle, as seen here:

The “haircomb” is the power consumption while sending individual bytes over SPI to the RFM12B module (and the received ACK after that), whereby the ATmega is even going to sleep between those bytes. For reference: the entire trace on this last screen is similar to the little blip marked “RFM12B transmission” on the previous screen. It’s not only considerably more detailed, but actually calibrated in 5-mA steps on the vertical axis.

Fascinating stuff, and no doubt a major reason why JeeNodes can perform so well nowadays in terms of ultra-low power consumption. If you had asked me this in 2008, I honestly would never have thought such a level of insight and performance to be attainable by anyone without access to a big research lab!

The Easy Electrons series is a set of weblog posts which were published end of 2010 and beginning 2011 to try and bring across a bit of intuition w.r.t. electronics.

Many many times, people not trained in electronics struggle with the concepts of voltage vs. current, wonder why some component suddenly overheats, what a capacitor does, why you need a resistor in a certain circuit, or how large that resistor should be.

Unlike software, hardware and electronics are bound by the laws of physics. Painfully so, in fact – you can damage stuff when hooking things up incorrectly, and you can even get hurt if the voltages or currents involved are high enough. And it’s not just AC mains that can hurt you: even a car battery can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Knowing why things happen is extremely important in electronics. And learning the basics is really just a matter of reading up on it and investing a bit of effort. There’s no magic – in fact, there is so much knowledge about electronics nowadays, that you really can predict and explain stuff, even before hooking things up.

Since I loved tinkering with electronics as a teenager, I was lucky to gain a good deal of very intuitive knowledge about electronics early on. So much so, that basic DC electricity knowledge became second nature to me. Ohm’s law is not some technical rule, it’s obvious – the linear relation between voltage and current, and the fact that resistance is simply the slope of that relationship, is so ingrained by now, that I don’t even think of Ohm’s law as something distinct from the essence of electricity. Same for Kirchhoff’s laws – and the water analogy which works so well in so many cases to match intuition to the real world.

So the Easy Electrons series was born – no math, no theory, just a set of posts which tackle a number of electronics concepts in what I hope can bring across some of that intuition. My drawing tools at the time were based on paper and a scanner, so the drawings were a bit crude and hard to read – here’s an example where I’m trying to explain how to drive LED strips which draw more power than the weak I/O pins of an ATmega can provide:

There are posts about voltage and current, about power and heat, about resistors and capacitors, about LEDS and diodes, and about transistors and MOSFETs, to name a few.

Don’t take my word for it, heck… don’t even read my posts if you don’t want to – all I can say is: if you ever hook up electronics circuits of your own imagination and invention: get to grips with the basics, so you’ll understand why hooking up a bunch of LEDs in parallel is usually not such a good idea, why using a power supply with a higher voltage is likely to lead to overheating and damage, and why hooking up relays and motors often requires extra protective circuitry.

It’s not hard, it’s not magic, it requires no math of any sophistication (and there’s always the brilliant Khan Academy if you want to brush up on it anyway). It can be exhilarating to be able to design and predict what a circuit will do before hooking anything together.

Electronics is a truly wonderful field to explore (and it’s huge!). You don’t need much to experiment with, and you will learn a lot – if only to become quite respectful of the laws of physics, which are merciless (still: most mishaps are harmless and nothing gets damaged).

You’ll run into everything from “nothing happens” to “it’s smoking”, and it’s terrific fun!