To get an indication of battery power drain, I measured the voltage drop over a 47 Ω resistor in series with the 5V supply, using a JeeNode with Rooms Board and the latest version of the “rooms” sketch.

Here’s the blip I see, once a second (100 mV/div and 20 msec/div):

That’s a 40 msec pulse of about 5 mA, in other words: 5 mA during 4 % of the time, which averages out to around 200 µA current draw continuously. Not bad, but not stellar either: it’s 4 times the sleep mode current.

Every once in a while, a much longer and bigger spike shows up:

Which looks like roughly 350 msec @ 12 mA.

Let’s assume the big one is a real transmission. It sort of fits: the spike at the end is a brief transmission at ≈ 35 mA total, followed by a 20-ish mA period of reception (waiting for the ack to come in).

Very roughly speaking, the area of that extra spike at the end is about the same as the 5-to-10 mA step at the start of this period. So as an estimate, we’re consuming about 12 mA during 350 msec – let’s round down to 300 msec.

Let’s also assume these bigger current patterns happen every 30 seconds, when the node is reporting changed values (everything other than motion gets reported at that rate in the latest “rooms” sketch).

So 1% of the time (300 ms every 30s), power consumption is 12 mA. This averages out to 120 µA continuous current consumption.

In other words: a JeeNode running this latest rooms sketch with the SHT11 and ELV-PIR sensors, is consuming roughly 200 (blip) + 120 (spike) + 50 (sleep) = 370 µA.

Using a 2000 mAH 3-cell AA battery, this should lead to a 225-day lifetime – over 7 months.

Can we do better? Sure.

It’s basically a matter of figuring out what’s going on during those 40 and 350 msecs, respectively. Interestingly, more can be gained by improving non-transmitting “blips” than twice-a-minute high-power RF packet exchanges.

Do those 40 ms @ 5 mA every second look a bit suspicious? Yep – that’s the “idling” power level. What happens is that I was a bit too pessimistic in the time spent in sleep mode. This was the code:

Looks like this is about 40 ms off, and so the code ends up waiting for the 1 sec timer to expire… in idle mode!

Let’s change this to end up closer to the desired time:

Here’s the new blip (different scales):

We’re down from 40 to 10 msec blips – tada!

That translates to an average 50 µA current draw from the blips, bringing the total down to 220 µA. Which translates to a 375-day battery life: over a year!

Now we’re cookin’ … but could we do even better? Sure.

Note that only the 2 ms spike at the end of the 5 mA blip is the actual active period. The time up to then we’re just waiting in idle mode – and wasting power.

We could shorten the sleep timer to 994 ms, since we don’t care whether readings are taken exactly 1 second apart. Now the RFM12B-based watchdog timer will wake us up just 2 ms short of the target time. And sure enough, the 5 mA blip is down to around 3 ms – shown here with an even further expanded time scale:

But that’s silly. We’re tweaking a millisecond timer, and we’re not even interested in an “exact” 1000 ms cycle in the first place! It makes much more sense to just use the RFM12B wakeup timer to get us close to that 1 second cycle, and then immediately take a measurement. Here’s the corresponding code change in periodicSleep():

Does this make a difference? Definitely:

One final remark: the above battery lifetime estimates do not take into account the increased power consumption when motion is detected and more packets are sent (up to once every 5 seconds). On the plus side, when no light / temperature / humidity changes happen, the packet frequency will drop further, to once-a-minute.

The above changes have been checked into the source code repository.

Update – I just found out that the DSO-2090 scope has a high-pass low-pass filter option:

Sure wish I’d found out about that feature sooner… it’s so much more informative: the initial ramp is probably the clock starting up, and the little peak could well be the LDR pull-up during ADC conversion!