Power consumption

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello

How do you reduce the arduino power consumption?

I found a few ways:

  • Turn LED off
  • replace delay(); with snore(); and the tinysnore library
  • reduce clock speed from 16 mhz to 1 mhz
  • use 3v instead of 5v

My questions are:
How do you reduce the clock speed from 16mhz to 1 mhz?
and how do you know if this has any implications for your arduino software?

Furthermore, how do you know you can use 3v instead of 5v?

2

Have you seen Nick Gammon's power saving tutorial?

...R

3

In the IDE you can set the clock to either external (the frequency has to match the actual crystal used and is used by the compiler for timing calculations), or internal (and there you can set the actual speed), then burn it to the chip (set "fuses").

Not sure if/how this works for an Arduino, as the development board itself may get in the way. But for low power use, you have to get rid of that part anyway. Go bare bones.

A way to save even more power is to switch to a different processor, such as the ATtiny85 or 84a. Whether that works depends on your actual project.