Battery powered Xenon with 5V sensor

Hello everybody! I am building a battery-powered sensor node based on Xenon board. The sensor that I NEED(really, no other option due to specs) is working on 5V and uses I2C and consumes 5ma during reading. I also want to mention that the node will read the sensor every 5 minutes, publish the value to the cloud and go to sleep(System.sleep).
For a start I got this board from sparkfun. Its a Logic Level Converter and also has voltage regulator. My questions are:
1.Is there a better board with Enable pin, so I can turn off the voltage regulator during sleep?
2.Is there a single chip that is able to convert both logic levels and has voltage regulator?(I would need this for the mass production version)
3.Can someone share experience with using Xenon on batteries with 5V sensor?

Thank you in advance!

Yes, it’s possible, but I’m not sure what off-the-shelf components are available to make it possible.

This is not exactly what you’re looking for, but for inspiration I built a board that sits underneath a Boron. It’s powered by the LiPo.

There’s a MIC2288 boost converter that makes 12V to power the oil tank level sensor that I have. The sensor output is 0-5V analog, so there’s a voltage divider to keep it under 3.3V. It’s powered off when not in use by MOSFET transistors.

You can power down the Boron using the EN pin so it gets down to 75 uA sleep current. There’s also a real-time clock chip to wake back up. I take measurements once per day.

I’ll eventually write up this project, but it might be a little while.

@rickkas7 Thank you for sharing this! Looks very good and close to what I need. If by any chance you have made the PCB design in Kicad, can you share the project files, so I can use it as a template?

2 Likes