Was wondering if you had stats on the power consumption of the new hardware, in particular of the Argon on WiFi and mesh, vs. the Xenon. I’m assuming the Xenon is supposed to be more power efficient using an Argon as a gateway, but I can’t actually see anything confirming this.
Not expecting final power numbers right now to be clear, but I’m assuming the aim is to be around as good/better than the current Photon, and for the Xenon to be quite a bit lower?
@hopkapi You are correct, we don’t have the final numbers yet. The nRF52840 has very impressive power consumption specs that we plan to take advantage of. While we have not finalized the powering scheme, its safe to assume that Xenon will have much lower numbers than the Argon. With the Photon we had very little room to play since we were dealing with the Wifi+uC SoC, but with Argon, we have more control.
Note that Xenons can only be used for internal mesh networking, and you’ll need a gateway device like the Argon, Boron, or Ethernet Wing to get you to the Internet/Particle Cloud.
Any other valuable inputs? We are always listening!
Do you think the Xenon would be low enough that it could run on a coin cell battery for an extended duration?
Depending on the application and utilization of the power-hungry elements like the radio, yes, a Xenon could run on a coin cell (like CR2032) for an extended duration. If you look at the reference development kit from Nordic for the nRF52840, you can see they include a CR2032 on-board.
Any updates on this? I’m trying to figure out whether I should buy a BTLE board today or wait for a Xenon.
Any news on that subject?
In particular, I was wondering how much power you can pull from the Xenon or Argon to power other Featherwings. I understand it depends on the buck converter used to feed the 3.3V.
Can I connect 2 relays pulling each 100mA from the 3V3 pin?
It looks like the regulator is a Torex XC9258, 1A at 3.3V. That includes powering the device itself, so not all of that is available to the FeatherWings. However, especially for the Xenon, the device itself doesn’t require much power.
Also, of course if you are powering by a 500 mA computer USB port, you won’t get the full 1A either.
Ouch, the idle current of the Torex XC9258 is 15uA! 
If you expect to power a xenon with a CR2032 then that’s the majority of your power budget right there. Given that you’re bound to cause high current bursts during TX a 1-year lifetime may not be in the cards.
Anyone have numbers? I’m getting the Argon down to 1.6mA (disabled WiFi, using sleep with Radio off option as well, even though I manually turn off Wifi. Also have Mesh.off() in setup as not using the mesh portion of the Argon.
SYSTEM_MODE(SEMI_AUTOMATIC);
WiFi.off();
delay(250);
System.sleep(D4, CHANGE, 600, SLEEP_NETWORK_OFF);
I’m wondering if the 1.5mA is an error in my reading device (Current Ranger).
@marcusone, the upcoming version of the DeviceOS will improve the Argon sleep modes with better management of the NCP (eps32).
@peekay123 thanks for the notice… any ETA for an RC or even beta?
is the 1.5mA somewhat accurate for 0.9.0 OS?
@marcusone, the ETA is soon bbut can’t say more. I haven’t tested the sleep mode power on the Argon so I can’t say if it’s right or not but it seems to be in the ballpark.