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Short Battery Life

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Edit, the solder pad should be bridged to power the board.

I reconnected the power LED. Please see image.

myMini.jpg


What should be bridged?
Do you mean the LED pad?
 
In the schematic it's labeled SJ1 but your board doesn't have any component names. The only thing that looks like a solder bridge is the thing in the white box near the top GND pin. If that is the bridge then it should be connected to pin 5 (top left) of the regulator. The bridge is there so you can disconnect the regulator and use a more efficient one for lower power usage.

Mike.
 
That instructable confirms the position of your solder jumper. Also shows how to put Arduino in sleep mode.

Mike.
 
That instructable confirms the position of your solder jumper. Also shows how to put Arduino in sleep mode.

Mike.

I had my Arduino Pro Mini connected wrong and now have it running again so I guess I am now back online.

I have also disconnected the the power LED.

My AmpMeter is connected to the RAW voltage input feed by the batteries.
Adding this code, the power usage dropped from 20.4ma to 16.5ma.

Code:
#include <LowPower.h>

LowPower.powerDown(SLEEP_2S, ADC_OFF, BOD_OFF);

With the power LED disconnected, it dropped from 16.5ma to 16.4ma. Not much of a savings.

As I see it, if I now proceed to remove the voltage regulator, there will be nothing to power the board.
Will I still be able to power and program it using the USB interface?
 
You replace the regulator with a more efficient regulator. If you remove it then you are correct, nothing will power your board.

Mike.
 
If you connect your new, more efficient regulator between USB in and your processor then you'll still be able to program via USB.

Mike.
 
The regulator that it said it has is not a. Bad one it has good specks
 
The regulator that it said it has is not a. Bad one it has good specks

Thanks. I will revist this later.

For now, I am thinking that some code changes may help a lot with power savings.

What I have in mind is to use an interrupt to wake the computer.
Suggestions and a tutorial about this would help as I have not done it before.
I will google this area as well.
 
Are you disconnected the transmitter, and putting the Arduino to sleep? - those are the important things - disconnecting the LED will make a massive saving once you've already done that.

Come to think of it, right now I am only putting the processor to sleep for (I think) only 2 seconds for each run of the loop.
Mike suggested I look at the transceiver data sheet on how to shut it down but I have not figured it out yet.
 
Come to think of it, right now I am only putting the processor to sleep for (I think) only 2 seconds for each run of the loop.
Mike suggested I look at the transceiver data sheet on how to shut it down but I have not figured it out yet.

Switch the power to it, using an I/O pin, and either a transistor or FET switch. Even if it has a shut-off capability, they still waste a certain amount of power.

I would also suggest you increase the sleep time (at least temporarily), as repeatedly coming out of sleep while measuring makes it more difficult to measure - to measure mine I temporarily switch the TMR off, so it never comes out of sleep. Then I measure again, without sleep at all, then measure how long it spends out of sleep during normal functioning (using a scope) - a bit of simple maths then gives you the average current consumption.

In my case I was amazed how little time it spends out of sleep, only a few micro-seconds out of every second.
 
Switch the power to it, using an I/O pin, and either a transistor or FET switch. Even if it has a shut-off capability, they still waste a certain amount of power.

I would also suggest you increase the sleep time (at least temporarily), as repeatedly coming out of sleep while measuring makes it more difficult to measure - to measure mine I temporarily switch the TMR off, so it never comes out of sleep. Then I measure again, without sleep at all, then measure how long it spends out of sleep during normal functioning (using a scope) - a bit of simple maths then gives you the average current consumption.

In my case I was amazed how little time it spends out of sleep, only a few micro-seconds out of every second.

Thanks. I will try that out.
 
Switch the power to it, using an I/O pin, and either a transistor or FET switch. Even if it has a shut-off capability, they still waste a certain amount of power.

I don't think you are going to believe this. As quick test I just simply disconnected the transceivers power jumper and the usage jumped up from 16.4ma to 19.7ma.
 
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