Spark Core & Low Power Modes

[RWB]

Saw this tutorial on Adafruit about putting the CC3000 and Amtel into low power modes to get longer run times and more efficient operations power wise.

This is certianly something that I want to explore further.

I’m interested in low power modes + using solar and ultra efficient solar charge controller chips + sharp memory LCDs to keep devices up and running even under normal house or office lighting.

Anyways here is the article: http://learn.adafruit.com/low-power-wifi-datalogging/overview

[BDub]

Nice. I was wondering why your cutting mat was so perfectly new looking... I see that's Adafruit's picture xD

More info here:

Findings sleep modes

[wgbartley]

It seems that @peekay123 and myself have kinda thread-jacked another thread with talk about power consumption. I vote we move the conversation to this thread.

To continue that thread...

@peekay123

@wgbartley, would it be worth getting my results in there for a bigger dataset? It seems to me that your findings should become a white paper on Core power modes, not just a post. This would be the first proper profiling of power modes and an opportunity to present recommended operating modes. One thing that would be cool is to estimate milliWatt/hr or milliAmp/hour figures for battery planning.

Have you seen high peak current consumption like I did? I would love to plot current vs time around the wakeup/publish/sleep event to see how long it takes to wake/connect. I would be more than glad to help if you want to extend the findings and do a more detailed report.

I have not been doing anything super scientific here. Just plugging a Core into the battery and letting it sit on the kitchen countertop until it stops blinking. I don't have any equipment to profile current usage unless I want to sit with my core with a cheap multimeter and hope it picks up current spikes with it's 1-second update cycle. I don't have the spare funds to spring for something fancy like an oscilloscope.