I am building an SMS sender and receiver with an Arduino nano and a GPRS module named SIM 800L. The idea of the project is to power both with a battery so that I can work for a few months.
The SIM 800L board needs 5V and peaks of 2A. My idea was to use a 3.7 LiPo battery and a DC DC converter to power everything (arduino and SIM 800L) with 5V. However, I have tested the DC DC converter and it draws 0.4 mA by itself (with no load), which is too much provided that I want it to work for long time
Is there any elegant alternative to power Arduino nano and SIM 800L with a battery having minimum consumption?
What about using 2 x LiPo batteries in series then a regulator to get to your 5v ?
If your SIM 800L draws 2A then a residual of 0.4mA on the converter is maybe acceptable and you just need to size the battery to the load and the uptime you are trying to achieve.
I used this for a trial and am planning on using it with an a6 thinker sms chip. I think the a6 might be more efficient, I found that somewhere. I was able to power an Arduino for 6 weeks 10 sec/min on 3 aa batteries. I am planning on in the real project to use a lipo battery and only fire up once per day. I am hoping for greater than a year. I will use a 3.3v mini pro and remove the led and the regulator. With this setup, no need for sleep. The pro mini is more efficient that the uno or nano.
