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Messages posted by: obstler
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Thanks for figuring this out, I now get the following results with this setup:



sleep current when powered from 4x AA NiMH Eneloop on VIN: 0.02 mA (19.8 uA to be exact)

I can definitely live with that, should allow for quite some battery life time.

This could probably still be improved by bypassing the voltage regulator and powering straight to VCC, but definitely good enough for now to finally deploy a battery powered wireless field node
I've also tried completely without any Serial output, so not even a Serial.begin, and it didn't make any difference.

would also be interested to read about what kind of sleeo power consumptions others achieve with their MiniWireless Anarduinos, and the relevant sleep code.

thanks!
I've tried using Lowpower, Narcoleptic as well as the native avr/sleep & avr/power libraries, all yield exactly the same results.

the flash sleep command using the moteino spiflash library also worked, as the power was reduced accordingly, and also is the same when the flash is sent to sleep or is physically removed.

unfortunately I'm completely out of ideas now, and am hoping to find some help here....
Partly out of curiosity and partly out of frustration I butchered one of my MiniWireless boards and desoldered the flash, RTC and RTC crystal to see if that helps lowering the sleep power consumption. Unfortunately, this is not the case, it is still quite high at around 0.38-0.4 milliAmps. I also tried powering directly via 3V3 in case the voltage regulator was wasting too much power, but got the same result.

For comparison I took a cheap chinese Pro Mini 3V3 board, added a RFM69HW module and used the same sketch sleeping the wireless and the arduino, which results in only 0.045 milliAmps sleep power consumption. Not great, but still better than the MiniWireless by a factor of 10.

I would really appreciate any help at all to lower the MiniWireless sleep power consumption.
After lots of searching I found the below code to put the SPI Flash memory to sleep on the Moteino forum.

With that the sleep power consumption is now 0.380 milliAmps, which is better than before but still too high by a factor of about 100.

Just one good sample code on how to put all the Anarduino MiniWireless components into lowest power sleep would be really helpful!

two updates to the mentioned issues:

the frm69 radio library doesn't need a wakeup call, reading on other forums confirms that send simply needs to be called after sleeping. my sending issue was probably caused by not connecting an antenna to the board -- no idea why it still worked upon intitial powerup and the other sketch without sleeping, but now with an antenna the radio send works fine after waking up.

the corrupted serial debug output seems to be related to (not) flushing the serial buffer before sleeping, calling a Serial.flush() helps, but there's still some output corruption from time to time. I can live with that as is is only used for debugging.

My main issue now is getting the MiniWireless board to sleep with minimal power consumption, see other topic -- currently I'm far away from being able to deploy a battery powered node:

http://forum.anarduino.com/posts/list/39.page
When putting a MiniWireless with RFM69, Memory and RTC to sleep do we need to put the Memory and RTC to sleep also? If so, how do you put them to sleep or powerdown?

I'm sleeping with the following code:



But I'm still measuring 3.9 mA in sleep mode, so I'm guessing not all the components are sleeping/powered down properly.

There's nothing else connected to the board, just 5V VCC and GND through the multimeter.

what is the proper sleep procedure the get close to the

MiniWireless with 128Mb MEM,RTC, on-board RTC supercap, and supporting extreme low power hibernation < 50nA


quoted description?
I recently received my order of Anarduino MiniWireless with RFM69 modules and I'm trying to setup a battery operated wireless node that basically sleeps until woken up by external interrupt.

While I can get the sample TNode/TGateway sketches from the MiniWireless page working, I'm having troubles with the radio after sleeping -- basically the radio only works before the first sleep. Serial output:



I've tried with two different libs (jeelabs and LowPower), but the result is basically the same. Most of the time the serial debug output keeps working, while the radio never sends after the first sleep. But after many sleep/wake triggers the serial output also starts getting corrupted, outputting garbage characters like and just looping between sleep/wake forever.

Do I have to re-initialize/wake the radio after sleeping? The different samples I've found online seem to to simply call radio.send after waking up. Do I need to delay before/after calling readio.send or sleep?

I've attached the sketch below, maybe someone has some pointers on how to fix this issue, or links to/a working sleep/interrupt sample with the MiniWireless/RFM69 . The sketch is based on the (working) TNode with as few modifications as necessary.

code:


 
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