Reply To: Testing power consumption

Gosh @shicks that is great to hear.  I wonder would you share how you made the sleep measurements with the microSD present. Any sketches for putting the mega1284 to sleep. Getting to 0.5mA would be fantastic!

Matt Interesting real data with a coulomb counter. Great stuff.

My current measurements on 0.28.01 for sleep are 2.5mA . I haven’t got a test setup for other modes at this point, but probably will have in the next couple of weeks.

For my current measurements I run it only from the battery and put a Adafruit INA219 in series, with a simple driver polling once a second, running on a separate Mayfly and then visually monitor current.

I’ve put together a spreadsheet for how  power is used. I tend to calculate in mAseconds and then of course 3600mAseconds = 1mAhr.

Since I’m also wanting to tweak production code, I need debugging. I modified the FTDI cable so that only the processor Tx and the Gnd are connected, and debug output will advertise what state the processor is in. For an FTDI connector –  male to male pins and just snip all pins except critical ones.

So from the spread sheet, for sampling period 900sec, using Readings 6.5mA@10secs, LTE 35mA@50secs,

Then for 24 hrs, 96*15minutes

sleep at 6mAs the calculation is 182mAHrs  close to yours

sleep at 2.5mA then   104mAhrs

sleep at 0.5mA  59.6mAhrs   ~ (I want it!)