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

[Gopiballava Flaherty]

The toolchain is proprietary, and I didn't like it much when I used it, but the low power modes can be epic:

http://www.ti.com/tool/ez430-rf2500

http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slaa378d/slaa378d.pdf#page18

Using two AAAs:
Transmitting every two seconds they should last >5 years
Every 16 seconds, about 34 years

How often do you need updates? Sparkfun sells some little transmitter only hardware that would possibly make sense as an xbee alternative. 

Thanks,

gopi at iPad

On Jan 30, 2012, at 0:47, Jonathan Lassoff <jof at thejof.com> wrote:

> 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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