[Noisebridge-discuss] Long-lived, battery-powered AVRs

[Mitch Altman]

I'm not familiar with Xbee, so I don't know if it has a low-power mode. But AVR chips are pretty low power when in sleep-mode. But Arduino isn't so low-power, so if you can use the AVR micro without Arduino, that'll save you power.

 

Mitch.

 



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> Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:47:40 -0800
> From: jof at thejof.com
> To: noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> Subject: [Noisebridge-discuss] Long-lived, battery-powered AVRs
> 
> I'm interested in helping someone I know with a project to build a
> remote AVR-based sensor (arduino parts) that will use an Xbee to
> detect a gate latch opening and closing. Since it's in a bit of a
> remote spot, it has to be battery powered.
> 
> As we're brainstorming ways of saving power, we thought of a couple of
> ways of not keeping things powered all the time:
> 
> - Use CPU sleep on the AVR so as to only periodically wake up and
> poll the state of the gate sensor. I think the Xbee would still draw a
> bit of power still.
> - Use a transistor that can trigger a flip flop with a transient
> amount of power from a coil in the sensor, and use that state to
> switch the AVR on, and have it turn itself back off, once done
> signaling.
> 
> I'm sure there's been some past work on remote AVR sensors before, but
> I can't find anything that seems quite like what we're trying to do.
> 
> Any advice on something like this?
> 
> Cheers,
> jof
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