Is an Arduino even the right approach for this project?

Hi,

I wanted to make a small project which requires a small tune to be played after a button press. This alone wouldn't be a problem for my Arduino skills so far, but I want the button to be active all day and it needs to be pressed like 5 times a day roughly. Since my knowledge in hardware is limited I was wondering if an Arduino would be the right hardware choice, since the power consumption would be quite high while waiting for the event of a button press. But the relative long stating time of a few seconds make the option of starting and shutting down the Arduino unfeasable right?
Which approach would you choose for this kind of project, so that the power consumption is minimal and the connected battery can last as long as possible.
Thank you for your help! :smiley:

Put it to sleep and wake it every so often to check the button.

You could create a circuit such that the Arduino is normally powered off and pressing the button connects the power. Then the Arduino takes over and keeps the power on (probably through a transistor) until it has finished its task.

And have a look at Nick Gammon's low power tutorial

...R

An simple Arduino Pro Mini with the regulator and LEDs removed can be woken upo with a switch press.

In sleep mode it will consume around 0.15uA, giving a projected battery life on a set of AAs of around 2,000 years, although the batteries would be flat due to self disscharge in about 5 years with Alkalines or 25 years with Lithiums.

srnet:
An simple Arduino Pro Mini with the regulator and LEDs removed can be woken upo with a switch press.

In sleep mode it will consume around 0.15uA, giving a projected battery life on a set of AAs of around 2,000 years, although the batteries would be flat due to self disscharge in about 5 years with Alkalines or 25 years with Lithiums.

Do you mean a normal sleep or the deep sleep mode? (SLEEP_MODE_PWR_DOWN)
Is it worth it to switch to a Arduino Pro Mini for lower power consumption, or is a Arduino Nano (which I have here already) just fine?
Or should I maybe just switch to a atmega328p or maybe even a atTiny85 since my commands I'm trying to do are quite basic and this way I dont have to remove leds and so on.
Another idea I had was to program my little tune into the setup class and go into a deep sleep afterwards without checking any watchdog timer. By pressing a button connected to the reset pin the melody can be played again without waiting for the full booting time. Is this a bad form of using the ardunio?
Sorry for the load of questions. I'm trying to learn about low power consumption, since I didn't bother too much so far.

I dont think there is a 'normal' sleep, for the details of which modes to use to get the sllep current as low as 0.15uA, read the tutorial mention in post #2.

I doubt a Nano will get anywhere near that level of sleep current, unless you to remove the USB to serial converter, thats why a Pro Mini was suggested.