Trying to lower power consumption by using bluz to turn photon on/off

[ruben]

Continuing the discussion from Photon with BLE:

@eely22

For the second question, both the P1 and the Adafruit board you mentioned already have an antenna designed into them. Are you trying to make your own board with the P0 and nrf8001 and have them share the same antenna?

For the third, yes, the bluz gateway will use the P0 and an nrf51822 on the same PCB. They will use the coexistence pins (to some degree). The nrf51822 doesn't explicitly support the same type of interface, so there will be some other means to try and coordinate the transmissions between the two.

Will the bluz chip be able to control the operation of the photon (ie the M3 chip)? The RF51822 uses about 6uA in sleep mode. The photon looks at least 1 order of magnitude higher. I'd love to be able to power down the M3 when not needing to use it, waking it up from a pin on the bluz.

[ruben]

Err… I see that there is a discussion on this at neighborhood.bluz.io in response to a question I asked on kickstarter.

[eely22]

Yes, there is a thread on the bluz forums about this, here is the link in case someone stumbles across this in the future: http://neighborhood.bluz.io/t/wakeup-photon-electron-from-nrf51822-in-gateway/143

The short answer is yes, it certainly is possible. It is going to take a little extra designing in the firmware, but I don’t think it is a big deal to add it.