Spark Battery Life Testing

Social Project Share
37

Spark Core is waking up, blinking D7 for 5 seconds, turning off D7 for 5 seconds, turning on D7, POSTing to a PHP script to log that it is alive, turning off D7, then going into DEEP SLEEP for 120 seconds, and repeating… shown here is the first part all the way through to deep sleep. 142-145mA while awake, and 187uA in deep sleep. Running off of a USB port, you can see the voltage measurement on the Tektronix DMM916. Current measured with an HP 34401A accurate to within a few uA’s.

I did not see anything like 500mA… you can watch for yourself :wink:

That’s pretty low current when off… we know the LDO is consuming like 120 or 150uA all of the time so most of it is due to that beast. Still though, anything close to 100uA or less quiescent current is pretty decent for battery powered devices. Obviously lower the better though!

Now to test the long 30 minute wait and see if it powers up current wise at all during that time. If it does my meter will audibly click and I’ll know… that’s about as high tech as I’m going to get with it tonight.

BTW: Here is the setup loop that blinks the D7 led, really I changed it like this so I could reprogram the Core without having to factory reset it :wink:

void setup() {
    pinMode(D7, OUTPUT);
    uint32_t startTime = millis();
    while(millis() - startTime < 5000UL) {
        digitalWrite(D7, HIGH);
        SPARK_WLAN_Loop();
        delay(100);
        digitalWrite(D7, LOW);
        SPARK_WLAN_Loop();
        delay(100);
    }
}
3 Likes