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

[Andy Isaacson]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 12:47:40AM -0800, Jonathan Lassoff wrote:
> 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.

This is pretty standard practice; AVRs have multiple sleep modes and the
deepest one is a few uA or less.  In this state they can still be woken
by an appropriate signal on the wake pin, from a switch or whatever.

> I think the Xbee would still draw a
> bit of power still.

The Zigbee chip is designed for long life battery powered apps, so it
probably has a similar sleep mode.  At the very worst you could just put
a power transistor on it and shut it off completely.

-andy