Battery powered arduino Device

Other Hardware 3rd Party Boards
1

Namaste to all geeks out there.
I have made a circuit where i am using arduino mini , MLX90614, MPU6050, RYLR896 LORA module and a TIP122 where tip122 is being used as switch to power on all the sensors and lora module. (in deepsleep mode, sensors are still working). the problem i am facing is its not running more than 12-15 hour with battery. i have connected two18650 battery which is 4.2V when fully charged.
any suggestion or link where i can read more on how can i extend the device life to atlest 5-6 month. for now i have not sent it to deep sleep mode. but i have tested it once, it dont work for more than 6-7 days. i can increase the days by increasing the time of sleep mode but that will not solve my problem and i cannot go more than 5-6 minutes of sleep mode.

2

Your design constantly draws power regardless of sleep mode.

3

Did you try everything in Nick Gammon's reference work?

https://gammon.com.au/power

4

Thank you for your concern. But i have mention that i am using TIP122 to controll the ground pin of all the components via arduino mini so that when in sleep mode , all the sensor are dead and dont use any of the battery.

5

@mancera1979 thank you for the link. have been to half of it and its seems very usefull and have already highlighted some major power saving ninja tricks.

6

Yes they do.

7

okay , i will check and update. i might be wrong as i have not checked them but only trusted tip122 .

8

I think @xfpd is suggesting that if the signal lines from the processor to the sensors are still connected, current can flow through those lines even if their ground pins are disconnected. When you disconnect the ground pin of a device, all of the other pins will float up to Vcc voltage. So if you connect them to GPIO pins on the processor that are LOW, current will flow. As Jeff Goldblum would say, "Ground always finds a way."

Or perhaps he meant something else.

9

Thank you for the reply and it seems interesting. is there any way i can stop the connection completely when not needed.

  • power_adc_disable(); // ADC converter

  • power_spi_disable(); // SPI

  • power_usart0_disable();// Serial (USART)

  • power_timer0_disable();// Timer 0

  • power_timer1_disable();// Timer 1

  • power_timer2_disable();// Timer 2

  • power_twi_disable(); // TWI (I2C)

will this help ??

10

I don't know what those things do. What I usually do is change the pinMode of each connected GPIO to INPUT.

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