Hi, I'm making a project where I intend to use an accelerometer to detect when motion ceases, and put the whole thing into a shutdown mode, where the accelerometer is polled occasionally.
I am using an MPU-6050 board.
Reading the datasheet on the MPU 6050, it clearly has a low-power mode of the form I'm interested in, and in this mode it only draws a few 10s of uA, which is great.
However, I just tried hooking it up to an arduino, putting it in this low power mode, and it is drawing around 1.5 mA, according to my multimeter. One thing that certainly jumps out is that the board has an LED. Does anyone know if this LED can be turned off, other than severing it?
And does anyone know of any other power-drains on these boards? Does it have a regulator that is always going to suck a mA, even if the MPU6050 is shut down?
Thanks for any info.
I see a (3.3volt?) regulator. Those small 5-pin regulators draw 50-100uA when idle.
And I see a LED with 1k current limiting resistor. That LED will draw (3.3volt - ~1.8volt) / 1000ohm = ~1.5mA.
So you could reduce most of the current draw by removing the LED current limiting resistor.
It is marked "102", and an arrow is pointing towards it.
Try to heat up both sides of the resistor with a soldering iron, with the help of a tiny bit of extra solder.
Swipe the resistor off the board (without using any force!).
Leo..
Thanks; I managed to scratch out one of the traces leading to the LED. The current draw went down to 0.08 mA. This totally makes sense with what you said about the regulator: the mode I put the MPU 6050 in says it should use around 20 uA, and so the reg is probably using another 50-60 uA. I think I can live with that.
I don't think I can get around using that regulator; my project will be LiPo powered, and the lipo voltage starts at 4.2 V, which is more than the 3.46V max of the MPU 6050 (they seem to be very precise with that number, so I assume 4.2 would be too much).
I got to work MPU6050 to a even more less power consumption.
Received help from this thread at stackoverflow.
Hope you get some better optimized results. 