Now that we walked through all the steps of reducing power consumption from the start through first tests, reducing consumption, optimized tests and adding a RTC including the problems of waking up from sleep via interrupt, adding a 24AA256 EEPROM as external memory. and using it in page mode it’s time to make a more useable system from what we have.
The first steps are increasing the datalogging interval and then using a supercapacitor.
The arduino TimerOne library described at http://playground.arduino.cc/Code/Timer1 is the starting point for this lib. In the original library that can be found at http://code.google.com/p/arduino-timerone/downloads/list the pwm pins are (sort of) hard-coded to fit to the ATmega168P / 328P (the chip of the Uno R3 board). I simply changed them to the pin settings of the ATmega1284P using maniacbug’s pinout. Then I doubled the code and adapted it to timer3 of the ATmega1284P and it’s pins. Continue reading
This is the next step forward In my “minimalistic standalone ATmega328 powered by a capacitor”. In this project I was walking from the start through first tests, reducing consumption, optimized tests and adding a RTC including the problems of waking up from sleep via interrupt. Then I added a 24AA256 EEPROM as external memory. EEPROMs are good for data storage as they keep data even when supply voltage has gone down. But they are slow, especially in write mode. This means that a lot of time is spent by simply writing two bytes of data into this memory and thus, energy is consumed during this time. Now with the 24AA256 it is possible to write up to 64 bytes at once. This is called “block mode”. Let’s look if we can reduce energy consumption furthermore by using this feature. Continue reading