A common Arduino, for example the Mini, doesn’t draw a lot of power, typically 40 MA when connected to a USB cable. If you are going to power your Arduino with anything other than batteries, the power requirements are normally not a concern, it will be too few to make any difference. Once you start something like a remote monitoring app that you need to run on battery power, the power consumption can become significant. In my work experience, waiting to calculate the amount of time that an Arduino will go on with a battery pack is quite difficult due to the fact that there are many factors involved, first of all there are many types, Alkaline, Nickel Metal Hydride, Ions of lithium, rechargeable, non-rechargeable. Even for a certain type of battery, say triple A, there will be a wide variety of storage capacities depending on the style of the battery (nickel metal hydride or lithium ion) and there is likely to be variability between different brands (for you usually get what you get). to pay). When your batteries run out the supplied voltage drops, if you are using 4 triple A batteries, supplying six volts to operate an Arduino that requires at least 5V, the Arduino may stop working when the supplied voltage drops too low, despite the fact that there is still a substantial amount of energy left in the batteries.

I will not do any specific calculations here because I consider the figures to be impractical. I should mention that batteries are generally specified in terms of milliamp hours. So every time your Arduino is connected via USB, its running at 5 volts, if it draws forty milliamps, it is not the same wattage measurement as requiring forty milliamps from a 9V battery. Also, it depends on what you are. app. Are you just taking information from some kind of analog monitoring device or are you using it on a servo? These have dramatically different energy needs, and again, in my experience, calculating will not be helpful to you. I find the best way is to get some batteries that you have at home and see how long they last, then use those measurements to do empirical calculations.

Suppose you are working on a remote tracking device and you need to have the Arduino to continuously measure something for a significant period of time. I did something similar with a DS18B20 sensor that was inside one of the cold frames in my garden, it would have been a pain to get an extension cord out to the patio, and it’s not a good idea to leave it outdoors and exposed, so I decided operate with a battery.

The At mega and SAM processors that come in an Arduino contain some very sophisticated power management functions that you can play around with, but before we discuss the methods by which you can make your Arduino conserve power, we should really examine some easy solutions but more direct. The first and foremost thing would be to use an alternate Arduino whenever possible. The 3.3 volt Arduino will use less power than a 5 V Arduino for a certain type of application. Arduino Nano and Arduino Micro will use much less power than Uno and Mega, and if they work for your needs, this alone might be enough.

Another thing to think about is using a different type of battery. These days when we talk about batteries, it sometimes seems like there is this attitude that lithium ion batteries are best for anything. Lithium-ion batteries are excellent for having a very high power-to-weight ratio. This is great for projects like robots and other things that move. If your battery isn’t going to need to move, then a better solution might be a lead-acid battery, similar to the one in your car or truck, this is what I decided on in the cold frame of my backyard. I took a small lead-acid battery that could be used in a lawn mower, which I found at Wall-mart for around $ 28, it was a 12V 18 amp hour battery, this would be comparable to almost 70 nineV batteries with regarding capacity. This was ideal for my cold frame, and I just didn’t need to get confused with complicated power handling features.

What if you still want to conserve power and a different Arduino or larger battery doesn’t meet your requirements? So there are many approaches that we can try to make the Arduino conserve power. One technique is to bypass everything except the processor chip, you actually do this by avoiding the power connector, but directly supplying power to the processor with power, you must be careful here to stay within the operating limitations of the chip since it is powered on. your Arduino, that voltage regulator is there for a reason! This will save a significant amount of energy. The processor chip consumes much less power than the entire Arduino board will use, this usually comes in the form of heat lost from the dimmer and things like LEDs.

Another way to reduce power consumption is to slow down the clock. If you’re running a program like monitoring my backyard cold frame temperature every thirty seconds, the Arduino doesn’t need to run at full clock speed. This can be accomplished with the prescaler library. You can reduce the clock speed by a factor of up to 256, this will reduce a sixteen megahertz Arduino to a 62.5 kHz one, but when you find yourself checking a measurement every 25 seconds or so, this is more than enough, and this It will significantly decrease consumption.

For a remote monitoring project, the most effective technique you could do to improve efficiency is to instruct the Arduino to go to sleep. There is a library called narcoleptic that allows you to keep the Arduino in minimal power mode, only a timer works. This timer can be used to wake up the Arduino every 20 seconds like it needed to do. Many of the smaller 3.3V Arduinos will draw less than 1MA while sleeping.