As reported in a recent post, there were startup problems when powered from a 0.4 mA trickle-fed capacitor.
In short: it didn’t work…
The problem with a trickle-feed supply is not that the voltage level will ramp up very slowly (the brown-out detector and power-on reset circuitry should be able to handle that). The problem is that the circuit needs to draw less current than the trickle at all times – because otherwise the capacitor won’t ever reach its full charge level.
One problem was the MCP1702 voltage regulator, which has a large current draw before the input voltage reaches 3.3V where it can start regulating. So I removed the regulator, and created a setup which limits the capacitor charge to around 3.8V – thinking that without the regulator, the ATmega would at some point start up and immediately put itself and the RFM12B into sleep mode, letting the supply voltage rise a bit further.
Strangely enough, it didn’t work at all. I kept seeing a start-up spike of several milliamps. Here’s the current consumption on power-up (the scope shows the voltage over a 10 Ω resistor in series with the power supply):

That’s over 10 milliamps, for well over a second – Huh?
And then it finally dawned on me: the boot loader! The ATmega is set to look for an upload right after power-up or reset, which is what the boot loader is all about. Guess what it does: look for incoming commands on the serial port for roughly one second, before passing control to the main sketch stored in the ATmega.
Clearly, the boot loader is running at full power. Whoops!
So the first conclusion is that in this context, we can’t use a boot loader. The solution is to change the high fuse from 0xDA to 0xDB with an ISP programmer. It’ll make it harder to upload code, but there’s no other way.
Great. I thought that would solve the problem. But that’s not all. The default fuse settings also cause the ATmega to wait for 65 milliseconds on power-up. This is for crystals to get up to a stable oscillation. Unfortunately, that means the ATmega is spending 65 ms in a higher-power mode on startup.
So I changed the fuses to use the 1K / 14 CK startup mode (power-up / reset). The way I read this, it means that the ATmega will power-up after 1024 + 14 clock cycles once it comes out of hardware reset, and after 1024 clock cycles when coming out of sleep mode.
Furthermore, the divide-by-8 prescaler fuse bit needs to be set, because the ATmega will power up with a 2.7 V supply voltage (the BOD level). At that level, running at 16 MHz is way out of spec, and no doubt very unreliable.
So all in all, the following fuse settings are required:
- BOD level = 2.7V, i.e. don’t power up before the supply has reached 2.7V
- enable ÷ 8 pre-scaler on startup (can be disabled in software later)
- make the clock start up in low-power 1K / 14 CK mode
- disable the boot loader, jump immediately to the main sketch
Here is the power consumption with these changes (note the 40x X scale and 5x Y scale differences):

There’s still a 0.65 mA current draw during start-up. Unfortunately, this one is nasty: it’s caused by the RFM12B module, which powers up in this mode. Best thing I can do is put the RFM12B to sleep as soon as possible, but that can’t happen before the ATmega has started up fully. So basically, there’s a 0.65 mA current draw which we can’t get rid of (other than adding extra circuitry to control the RFM12B’s power – but see also below).
What this means, is that I’ll have to settle for a 1 mA trickle feed supply for now. It’s enough to keep charging the buffer cap, and this way things ought to finally get past that power-up hurdle.
And guess what? It works!

The cap charges until the supply reaches 2.7V, then the ATmega snaps out of reset and puts the RFM12B to sleep.
The interesting thing now, is to check whether that MCP1702 current anomaly on startup really was a problem. So I switched back to a standard JeeNode, and tried it with the above fuse settings.
Hey, it still works! So we could go back to a 12V zener charging a 100 µF cap. This puzzle has come full circle!
More good news – it looks like there is a sneaky way to avoid the 0.65 mA power-up current draw of the RFM12B: make the ATmega start up at 1.8V instead of 2.7V – the RFM12B isn’t pulling much current at that level. So if we turn it off right away then the RFM12B will be put to sleep before it gets a chance to draw too much current.
Does this work? You bet. Here is by far the craziest low-power setup I’ve ever been able to get going:

That’s a 100 µF cap charged using a 10 µA trickle. You can see the 1.8V bump where the ATmega kicks in, inits the RFM12B, puts it to sleep, and later on sends 2 packets. This is a standard JeeNode, but with special fuse settings:
- internal 8 MHz RC oscillator, fastest startup
- don’t enter the boot loader
- brown-out level is set to 1.8V
The fuse settings are: extended = 0x06, high = 0xDB, low = 0xC2.
Fascinating how everything affects everything, eh?
Update – I’m having some doubts about this last result. Will need to triple-check my calculations on this one. That last report is most definitely incorrect, there’s no way to get the RFM12B to start up with a 10 µA trickle – it starts up with the crystal oscillator active, which means that it’ll draw at least 0.6 mA until put to sleep.