Power Saving End Nodes

[johno123]

Hi All,

I have 5 end nodes with Moteinos working flawlessly with the new 2.2 code on them.  Has anyone else put in their own power-saving code to better handle battery life?  Only one of my nodes is plugged into mains power with an adapter, but the rest I temporarily plugged in with LiPo batteries and I can only get a couple of days worth of usage before they are drained.

Looks like Felix from LowPowerLabs uses the lowpower.h library to put both the radio and the Moteino down to lower power state at different parts of his mailbox sketch:
github.com/LowPowerLab/MailboxNotifier/blob/master/MailboxNotifier.ino

Anyone had any success with good power management with the awesome remote node code that's been posted here?

-John-o

[selcouth]

Mar 17, 2015 3:02:20 GMT johno123 said:

Only one of my nodes is plugged into mains power with an adapter, but the rest I temporarily plugged in with LiPo batteries and I can only get a couple of days worth of usage before they are drained.

Slightly off topic, I'm curious what LiPos you're using.

[johno123]

Cheapo ones from Seeed... Some older ones similar to these:
www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Lithium-Ion-polymer-Battery-2A-p-603.html

[johno123]

Looking through the relay code it appears that folks attempted to put in some sleep functions but Computourist commented them out due to comms issues. All of my nodes were based off of the DHT code. I'll attempt some local changes on some nodes and see if I can get something that is halfway stable.

[computourist]

Mar 18, 2015 4:15:36 GMT johno123 said:

Looking through the relay code it appears that folks attempted to put in some sleep functions but Computourist commented them out due to comms issues. All of my nodes were based off of the DHT code. I'll attempt some local changes on some nodes and see if I can get something that is halfway stable.

Hi,

The relay node code was contributed by etrombly. Maybe he can tell you what kind of issues he had with the energy-saving code and why it is commented out..

- Computourist

[etrombly]

It may have been due to the python gateway code I'm using, but it was causing messages to be dropped. I think it should still work fine if you uncomment the block I commented out. (I was working on switching the uptime to use Time.h, but I don't think I pushed that yet. Worst case your uptime will be off). When I was testing it the power savings weren't dramatic, the largest consumption is from the radio. If someone wants to give it a try, let me know how it works for you.