Arduino Yun, power draw

[dingbatca]

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.  :-(

[federicofissore]

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

[Grumpy_Mike]

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.

[dingbatca]

And here I was complaining about 75ma@5V on my https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/iMX233/iMX233-OLinuXino-NANO/open-source-hardware

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

[Grumpy_Mike]

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.

[federicofissore]

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

Code: [Select]

option disabled 0 to

Code: [Select]

option disabled 1
- edit file /etc/rc.local and change line

Code: [Select]

wifi-live-or-reset to

Code: [Select]

#wifi-live-or-reset
- reboot

[Jantje]

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 
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

[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.

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

[dreggy]

...
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.

[toggio]

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.

[janwillemsmeenk]

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

[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."

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?

[rkguy]

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:
http://code.google.com/p/wr703n-uboot-with-web-failsafe/source/list
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:
http://code.google.com/p/wr703n-uboot-with-web-failsafe/
Any feedback are welcome.
Thank you.

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

[rkguy]

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 (https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=178259#p178259) 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 http://forum.arduino.cc//index.php?topic=190441.0

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

[parmares]

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