Otherwise great post, though I'd love to have seen the images!
Else, the schematic is here (the first pic is just a shot of the atmega chip): https://ibb.co/8gVbm1XR
https://web.archive.org/web/20210615000000*/https://makecade...
* https://minac.github.io/2015-05-20-s3-cloudfront-access-deni...
It can sleep and only use ~66 microamps at 5V with the watchdog timer enabled. That's 330 microwatts. A 1000 mA lithium cell (3.6 watt-hours) could then run it for ~10909 hours, or 454 days (~1 1/3 years).
Almost every microprocessor made these days has some sort of low-power sleep. The ATmega series aren't even particularly good at being low-power.
Of course, you then realize the "arduino" is really just a badly designed development board for an atmega, and they went and used cheap voltage regulators that have an idle current consumption of > 1 mA, and give up on the whole project.
My EE partner in crime ended up designing a prototyping board himself, with various creature comforts included that we needed shields for with Arduino, and I ended up writing just C with avr-libc instead of using any of the arduino library/tooling, developing a set of core modules to use the things we added to our boards, in a more flexible manner than the Arduino library. It took some time, but it saved us a lot of time and friction in our future prototyping efforts.
All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering. I do think they could've done a better job bridging the gap between that and prototyping though.
* Ten years ago, so my memory of specifics is very fuzzy and only reflects the state of things back then.
Baby’s first microcontroller project is exactly what they excel at and, by doing so, they made hobbyist microcontroller development vastly more accessible.
The Arduino value comes from the ease-of-starting and they made that a lot easier than the then-extant state of the art.
So ... exactly for what the device is being sold as? Weird complaint: "I purchased an apple, and all I got was an apple that's only good as an apple."
>I spent some time working on the firmware side of developing custom electronics based on various AVR chips, ATmega328 among them*
Then you would know that ATmegas are in a lot of successful commercial products from the past.
Like I said:
>>All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering.
I was just adding my 2 cents on Arduinos based on personal experience. That is all.
>Then you would know that ATmegas are in a lot of successful commercial products from the past.
Yes. What led you to believe I was suggesting otherwise? I made no criticism of the ATmega328, any other ATmega chip, or the AVR ISA for that matter. I could make some if I wanted to, but it doesn't seem relevant. The topic was Arduino boards, which typically contain an AVR chip, but is in fact not a chip but a dev board.
The ideal system for me would be almost identical to the original machine. Simple OS (not Linux), basic applications, no web browser or WiFi.
i.e. https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/devicedoc/39941d.pdf
That's the kind of performance that makes you question the accuracy of your test equipment.
For more standard cases, the 43uA from the article is roughly the same order of magnitude you'll get from pretty much any micro in sleep mode, after doing your first pass low power optimisation. The stuff I normally work with gets about 10. The thing is just, most of the time, that's low enough already - for this project 2500mAh/43uA = 6 years of sleeping. The bigger factor is the current it consumes while awake - and that's where the Arduino's a bit of a letdown, the stuff I normally use is only in the order of 100uA while awake.
This is when the MCU itself you're using doesn't have this functionality of if it's still consuming too much power. MCUs like the ATMega368(PU) consume ~100nA in their deepest sleep states, so it can be a rather drastic reduction in some cases.
#include <JeeLib.h;>
What is the casino thing ? It looks like an abandoned project that got web squatted / Brandjacked.
Source code: https://github.com/jeelabs/jeelib
Website: https://jeelabs.org/202x/sw/jeelib/
The latter redirects to a page that shows Git commits, but it's a hidden page in a Dutch site about online casinos. It does look a bit shady. In the GitHub org of jeelabs, there are only two authors and neither seem to be based in the Netherlands.
Here's an archived website that documents the jeelib library.
Relevant line:
> a Sleepy class for ultra low-power sleeping of ATmega and ATtiny µC’s
From a quick skimming of the codebase, I couldn't find this class. If I were the author, I would have forked the Sleepy class for my own use.
Edit: Here's the definition of the Sleepy class.
https://github.com/jeelabs/jeelib/blob/6df2d8da785aca77790e9...
It uses avr-libc's sleep functions.
> <avr/sleep.h>: Power Management and Sleep Modes
https://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/user-manual/group__avr__slee...
He did a series of posts as he made it ever more power efficient, but that was about 10 years ago.
ggm•6mo ago
I think zigbee does stuff in this space. 6lowpan too.
Put a wifi or bt shield on, battery will drop faster.
If the led can blink a code, you could remote read it off a phone or something. Newton's did IR networking. The conference translation headsets use it too: the radiators for the signal get appreciably hot.
userbinator•6mo ago
No, that's the phone itself transmitting in its TDMA timeslots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-division_multiple_access#...
ggm•6mo ago
Would you agree it's part of the re-initialisation sequence, even if not directly caused by the transmission infra talking to the phone?
KaiserPro•6mo ago
kinda, but in this instance the radio in receive mode is quite expensive, something like 1-20ma. To get years long battery power you need micro amps.