Monthly Archives: November 2013

Arduino powered by a capacitor – extending memory

Leave a reply

atmega_capacitors_pv_6In my “minimalistic standalone ATmega328 powered by a capacitor” project I was walking from the start through first tests, reducing consumption, optimized tests and adding a RTC. The RTC has let me learn a lot about waking up from sleep via interrupt.

Now one more component is due to come: external EEPROM to extend data memory. As I’m hoping to extend total uptime more I probably will run out of EEPROM memory when keeping the basic example (reading one ADC channel once a second and writing data to EEPROM). Furthermore, when it comes to practical use of the system, internal EEPROM is too small also.

Continue reading →

Arduino powered by a capacitor – timing with RTC

2 Replies

atmega_capacitors_pv_5There are already some posts about my testsystem, Arduino powered by a capacitor: The start, first tests, reducing consumption and optimized tests. With different power saving techniques power consumption could be reduced by a factor of around 300. Now let’s look how we can go further and come step by step to a system that can be used in real life.

The basic idea is a microcontroller system e. g. for datalogging of slowly changing signals like room temperature or solar irradiation. In these applications the controller is up for a very short time and then sleeps until the next event. In the basic tests with a standalone ATmega328P timing between two logging events was done by the internal watchdog timer. Now let’s try to improve this…

Continue reading →

ATmega328P wakeup from sleep via interrupt

5 Replies

atmega_capacitors_pv_4In my project “Arduino powered by a capacitor” (start, first tests, reducing consumption, optimized tests) I want to use an extermal timer like the DS1337 to generate periodic interrupts for my ATmega328P that will wake it up from sleep to do datalogging or whatever is the desire.

Using a real time clock (RTC) has the advantage of higher timing accuracy but also brings in a new problem that is described and solved in this post. Continue reading →