After yesterday’s Wireless Light Sensor was announced, I wanted to push a bit more on the low-power front.

The POF described two simple tricks to get the power consumption from 19 to 3 mA, roughly. It turns out that a single extra step will get the idle consumption down to some 20 µA. That doesn’t mean we’re getting a 15-fold battery lifetime increase, because I’m measuring the current at idle time but not accounting for the brief periods of high-current activity which also occur. But it’s a major reduction in power consumption.

Here’s how … but this requires going a bit deeper into some low-level AVR/ATmega chip features.

First, here are some utility functions we’re going to need:

The lowPower() routine disables the ADC subsystem and then enters the specified low-power mode in the ATmega. Once it resumes, the ADC subsystem setup will be restored to its previous state.

The loseSomeTime() does just what is says on the box: go into comatose mode for a more-or-less controlled amount of time. The trick is to activate the RFM12B watchdog just before passing out. This leads to larger power savings than we would have with the ATmega’s watchdog, btw – and it’s easier to implement.

The complication is that we risk losing all track of time. It’s a bit hard for an ATmega to count heartbeats when its heart has stopped beating – not only are there no beats, it’s also stripped of its counting abilities while in coma…

So instead, we estimate just how long we’ve been away from the watchdog time chosen for the RFM12B, and correct the milliseconds timer built into the Arduino. That’s what the “timer0_millis” stuff above is about. It will not be quite as accurate as before, but that’s probably acceptable for a sensor node like this one.

The last issue is that we need an indication about how long we can go comatose. I’ve added a “remaining()” member to the MilliTimer class to obtain this information.

Now, all the pieces are in place to change the code in the Wireless Light Sensor from this:

.. to this:

So there you have it. Most of the time between each measurement once a second, the node will now go into a very low-power mode of around 20 µA. My current measurement tools are inadequate to measure exactly what amount of charge is being consumed, which is what this is really about. So accurate battery lifetime calculations are not yet possible – but I expect it to be in the order of months now.

I’ve updated the Wireless Light sensor POF to point to this post and include this trick.