IR Remote using Arduino nano

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

Hi,

I have made an IR remote using Arduino nano and its works great. The only problem is that i believe it might not be energy efficient. I have read that the battery might wear out in couple of days. Can anyone suggest me how to make it work for at-least 8 months or something?

I am willing to move to Arduino mini or Pro mini if that can somehow work more efficiently.

2

I have read that the battery might wear out in couple of days

But have you actually measured the battery life on your device?

How do you detect button presses? If you can arrange that any button press causes an interrupt, even if all buttons are wired to one interrupt, you can probably arrange that the nano is in power down sleep mode and only wakes up when a button is pressed. That will extend battery life a lot.

Pete

3

haxan:
Hi,

I have made an IR remote using Arduino nano and its works great. The only problem is that i believe it might not be energy efficient. I have read that the battery might wear out in couple of days. Can anyone suggest me how to make it work for at-least 8 months or something?

I am willing to move to Arduino mini or Pro mini if that can somehow work more efficiently.

I read that the Adafruit TVBgone uses a tiny85 and power savings techniques. Ladyada has a good writeup and schematic, google for it. Essentially, the tiny85 techniques also apply to the 328 used in the Nano.

A good read:
Nick Gammon on power saving

Ray

4

Thank you for your replies.

You can see (as mentioned in the article Gammon Forum : Electronics : Microprocessors : Power saving techniques for microprocessors ) The way the nano is made, even if you put it to sleep, it does consume rather large amounts of power (around 34.5 mA for uno).

I guess there is no work around other than to remove all the USB conversion chips etc OR perhaps use arduino mini because they are closer to the bare minimum essentials.

Any feedback please?