Battery consumption on Photon vs. Argon (or other?)

General
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1

Hi everyone,

I am using a Photon in a solar powered weather station at the moment. I keep the device alive with Wifi turned off most of the time in order to not miss rain count, wind speed, etc. (If I put the device to sleep I would miss out on weather events). I average and collect weather as often as possible, and make recordings every 30 seconds. Every 5 minutes I turn on Wifi, connect to the cloud, publish all frames of data, and then turn Wifi back off.

I am wondering if a direct swap out of Argon would save power. Any other advice would be helpful.

Thanks,
Greg

2

@ParticleD, or @mstanley are you able to assist?

3

The Argon’s processor uses a lot less power than the Photon’s. We are still characterizing the Argon, but since you keep the radio off most of the time, I am pretty sure you’d get longer battery life with the Argon.

Obviously more concrete comparisons will be possible once the characterization is complete. I don’t have a timeline for that at the moment though.

4

Thank you. Is the Argon a drop in replacement for Photon? (pin compatible?)

5

No it’s not entirely, but there is a special adapter that gets it as close as it goes.

To be more specific than that we’d need to understand your needs a bit more.

6

I am using with the Sparkfun Lipo battery shield and weather shield.

7

Everything seems to be working fine on the Argon with classic adapter, except there looks to be a 255 byte publish limit. On the Photon, I had 622 byte limit. I am running 0.9.0 firmware.

8

With 1.0.1-rc.1 1.1.0-rc.1 onwards that should be solved.

9

Awesome. I am updating now…

10

That did the trick. However I could not get the system update OTA to work even in safe mode. I ended up using the cli over USB. Thanks.

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