Strategies for maximizing battery life

CuriousCat
 
Posts: 5
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2019 6:51 pm

Strategies for maximizing battery life

Thu Mar 21, 2019 7:04 pm

I am considering using a battery-powered VoCore2 to run a sensor. What I envision is: VoCore2 spends most of its time off/asleep, then every hour an RTC will trigger it to boot up, take sensor readings, do some work with those, then go back to sleep.

One issue with this idea is the boot-up time. U-Boot waits around 10 seconds before beginning the normal boot process, which then takes around 30 additional seconds (with network interfaces up, etc). So, 40 seconds from power-on to a usable system. I think I could decrease the U-Boot waiting time pretty easily, but that still would leave 30 seconds or so of normal boot process that is costing me battery life every cycle.

Do you have any suggestions on how to speed up the boot process?

Or, is it possible to put the system into a deep sleep (while conserving power to the RAM) and waking out of that, rather than performing a cold boot each time?

Thanks!

Vonger
 
Posts: 896
Joined: Sun Oct 19, 2014 6:00 am

Re: Strategies for maximizing battery life

Mon Mar 25, 2019 3:48 am

there are some ways, I did not test... maybe you can reduce CPU speed by system control register. and turn off wifi to reduce power usage, but it still have to use around 50~60mA, not low.
and to boost system up speed, you can disable all the drivers you do not need, such as usb driver, file system, and fail-safe wait time etc, that can make it reduce into 12sec I think.
and uboot time, you can simple send a '\r' by serial port to make it boot quickly.

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