Arduino Yun, power draw

Info for all who seek to know the power draw of the Arduino Yun.
Every thing here is tested at 5V (USB) measured with a Fluke 115 meter:

Stock system booted, no connection, no sd: 200ma~270ma Seems to like to hover around 235~245ma but could peak to 300ma.
Stock system booted, with wired (cat5) networking: 277ma
Stock system booted, with wired (cat5) networking, max load: 315ma

I was a little shocked at how power hungry this device is. Lowest power draw seen was 170ma, in the first 1 second of booting. UBoot? So much for a low power Linux solution. :frowning:

Those are the numbers we saw. Yeah, it's not super low power but it's not even too hungry, if you sum up that it's running two processors and one it's acting as a wifi hotspot

So much for a low power Linux solution.

For Linux this is considerd low power, just like they think a 128MB memory is a small memory footprint.
They live in a diffrent world to us real low power and small footprint folk.

And here I was complaining about 75ma@5V on my iMX233-OLinuXino-NANO - Open Source Hardware Board

Any one know of any mini Linux board that draws less?

They said the Raspberry Pi was a lower power Linux solution at 800mA and I was shot down on their forum for suggesting that 800mA was in no way low powered.

Out of curiosity: have you tried measuring power consumption after having disabled wifi? (we haven't yet, I must admit)
In order to disable it, you need to

  • edit file /etc/config/wireless and change line option disabled 0 to option disabled 1
  • edit file /etc/rc.local and change line wifi-live-or-reset to #wifi-live-or-reset
  • reboot

you are running linux arduino and wifi.
Wifi is know to use energy.
If we say 0.3 amp 5Volt that makes 1.5 watt, right?
Seems pretty acceptable to me if you use all of its features :smiley:
I know you won't run for a month on a battery with this power consumption but I feel it is acceptable for running a wifi connected pc with arduino.

I noticed that yun is getting warmer than standard arduino's. I'm not saying it is hot but it is warm after running for a while.

Best regards
Jantje

I tried turning wireless off, but never saw better then a 20ma improvement. Even at it's lowest power measured (170ma) it is still to much. Just trying to build a remote solar powered weather station.

Using a pure Arduino solution would be a bit hard (for me). Doing compression (gzip/lzma) with 2k of ram is near impossible!

DingbatCA:
...
Using a pure Arduino solution would be a bit hard (for me). Doing compression (gzip/lzma) with 2k of ram is near impossible!

Yes, but using the yun you can transfer your data to linino or save it to sdcard using the bridge library and then lunch a script to gzip. This is the awesome part of yun, let do the 'hardware' part to Arduino and the most huge operations to linux.

Tested yesterday with wifi enabled:
250mA @ 5V = 1.25

That's definitely low power... The raspberry pi is about 400mA without wifi and without Arduino.
So i think it is really not bad.

DingbatCA:
I tried turning wireless off, but never saw better then a 20ma improvement. Even at it's lowest power measured (170ma) it is still to much. Just trying to build a remote solar powered weather station.

Hi Dingbat,

Check out our SODAQ board. We've been building Arduino based weather stations that draw around 3mA, that's 100 times less!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/386717175/sodaq-a-lego-like-plug-in-rapid-prototyping-board

I am trying to figure out how to send a command to power down the linino system when I want to put my yun in "standby."

I came across this to send commands from the Leo to linino but I am not understanding if shutting down the bridge is simply severing the connection or actually turning off the linino processor, wifi , etc. I venture to guess that it is not doing what I want.

arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/YunSerialTerminal

.... } else if (c == '~') {
Serial1.write((uint8_t *)"\xff\0\0\x05XXXXX\x0d\xaf", 11);
Serial.println("Sending bridge's shutdown command");
....

Edit: I just realized that this closes the bridge and opens a terminal. Not what I am looking for. I imagine there is a way to shutdown the AR9331 and it's connected components somehow. Maybe a look at the Datasheet is in order. Does the Leo require the Ar9331 to be on?

I saw an interesting albeit old post about lowering the frequency of the processor.

It's seems the 300,300,150 case work at the version r26,see the change list for detail:
Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.
So welcome brave guys do test,now i do the these test under the 300,300,150 case:
1.run iperf between wlan and wr703n ethernet port.
2.repeat reboot board not hang now.
How to compile the image for the 300,300,150 case:
1.check out the souce code:
svn checkout http://wr703n-uboot-with-web-failsafe.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ wr703n-uboot-with-web-failsafe-read-only
2.refer this patch change the Makefile:
--- Makefile (revision 26)
+++ Makefile (working copy)
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@

#not export any PRODUCTOR_CPU_*,will run 400_400_200.
#export PRODUCTOR_CPU_350=1
-#export PRODUCTOR_CPU_300=1
+export PRODUCTOR_CPU_300=1

all: decompress_toolchain uboot
@echo tuboot.bin size: wc -c < $(BUILD_TOPDIR)/bin/tuboot.bin
3.then refer the guide in this page:
Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.
Any feedback are welcome.
Thank you.

https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=178259#p178259

Just to make sure that I let this get back to the community, here is a message I got from Federico after I asked him directly about controlling the Atheros processor.

I remember your post and I confirm what I've written that day: there's
no way to turn on the ar9331 one you turned it off. That would mean the
32u4 is using one or more pins to control something like a relay but
would mean losing those pins

I've also seen that post about the frequency and the intro "welcome
brave guys" makes me think it's something highly experimental

The 32u4 can indeed run without the atheros, but cannot turn it back on,
thus, once turned off, you'll end using a leonardo instead of a yun

PS: please, next time write directly on the forum since this kind on
knowledge is worth sharing with everybody

Best regards

Federico

Of note, the scaling he (and I) was referring to is here (OpenWrt Forum Archive) and is from 2012. I'm not sure what progress has been made since then (if at all).
Also of note, I think Federico had replied to a post by another person who asked the same question (which I found herehttp://forum.arduino.cc//index.php?topic=192413.0 - it looks like I'm not the only one that would love this).

I also found a post where some folks show some power savings using sleep mode Yun & Sleep mode - Arduino Yún - Arduino Forum

Thank you to Federico and others for shedding some light on this.

Hi
I use USB as input voltage but YUN is not work, all LEDs off...!!!! I am confused , can u help me PLZZZZZ

Have you check you USB cable? Have you used another device on the port/cable like an USB stick?

rkguy:
I am trying to figure out how to send a command to power down the linino system when I want to put my yun in "standby."

You should be able to power down the linux portion by using runShellCommand(). It also looks like pressing the YUN RST button (next to analog pin A4) powers the linux portion back up without affecting the Arduino part.

My setup was:

  1. Started blink program running on Arduino, pin 13.
  2. SSHd into Linino and issued halt command.
  3. Got disconnected from SSH, Yun dropped off of the wireless network.
  4. Observed that blink program was still running.
  5. Pressed YUN RST button (quick press, less than a second).
  6. Observed that blink program continued running uninterrupted.
  7. After a minute or so, Yun came back onto the wireless network and I was able to SSH in again.

The upshot is that you should be able to trigger the YUN RST button from Arduino, perhaps by connecting it to a digital output, or less invasively, having an arduino controlled servo press it. So it should be possible to issue a halt command to Linino via runShellCommand() and then restart it using the YUN RST button. I'll do more tests and report on my results.

dmitriyp:
You should be able to power down the linux portion by using runShellCommand(). It also looks like pressing the YUN RST button (next to analog pin A4) powers the linux portion back up without affecting the Arduino part.

Sorry, but you're not actually powering anything down or back up. You're just stopping an operating system, then rebooting.

Have you done any power measurements? That will stop Linux, but will not put the AR3391 into low power mode, nor turn off any of the associated power hungry peripherals. It may reduce current a little, but odds are it won't be much.

When you "shut down" a regular computer, you are stopping the operating system, then the last thing it does is send a command to the power supply that activates special switching logic to shut off the main power supply. Shutting down Linux on the Yun does not do the same thing - the Yun has no such hardware to disable power to the Linux processor or its peripherals.

Sorry, I replied on Arduino Yun - put linux environment to sleep or halt - Arduino Yún - Arduino Forum thread already, but in summary, no I haven't done the power tests yet so I realize I shouldn't have been using the phrases "power down" and "power up" in my posts.

Ok, I'll test the power draw just to confirm, but you're right. If halting linux doesn't actually power down the hardware then there's little point to doing it. Thanks for weighing in.

Please let me know if there's anyway to turn off the Arduino Yun WiFi.
I need to do this under the Arduino IDE with windows 7 (not LINUX).
After trying all suggestions from different posts/forums.
None worked as after 5 minutes the WiFi is enabled again.
None of these suggestions worked:
https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=189105.0

https://gist.githubusercontent.com/sgk/6641198/raw/c6c36b2c8a9d62036b11335f6515ce3c5ce03ee6/PatchYun.ino

Please advise which forum I can ask this on, etc.
Your advise is greatly appreciated.