Hi, We are doing a ecology type theme at school, and I a doing an assembly. Mine is part based on something dad is doing, part of it involves energy harvesting (there has been alot of posts on here lately about that sort of thing),
I havnt ever realy considered power consumption of my projects before. I rarely if ever do battery ones, and dont really pay attention to how much energy a circuit uses. But I have been playing around with some the kits dad has for his project. Its been a real eye opener!!! staggering what can be done with nA's and the odd burst of 1mA! What shocked me most was putting one of my projects on a test bed, all it does is read a humidity sensor every 15 seconds.
It runs at around 200mA with burst's of around 300mA while reading!! that dosnt sound like much to me, That was until I put the same sensor onto one the energy micro 32 bit boards!!. Even with a very clunky program I dropped it to around 10mA, using there program example tho, I can read the same sensor and run it off a TEG at around 100uA. But the have an example that uses some clever sleep techniques and that draws 4 nA most the time with a couple of bursts of 10uA AND displays a segmented display continuously!!!!
So in light of this, I am going to see what I can get done for an assembly in 2 weeks time, the idea is to get the dev board to do something semi interesting and run it from a TEG and small cap bank.
What I was wondering, seeing as there has been a few posts on energy harvesting etc, how many people spend alot of time getting there code etc tight? and pay close attention to energy used? I think pics are way behind in this regard, yes ok the 32 bit chips can be monitored in real time using REAL ICE and a special header, but generally pic's dont have this function, having seen it in action I am surprised its not a feature. Watching the code live against a graph showing voltage and consumption, really helps. You can the scroll back and place the cursor on the energy peaks and it shows the code line, that was running.
As more and more battery apps become the norm and more energy harvesting is used, I can see this being a big thing for the future. So what are others views? TOY or TOOL??.
Just interested in a discussion with the pro's, on the advantages and disadvantages of these systems. and views on the future of energy harvesting from small sources
I havnt ever realy considered power consumption of my projects before. I rarely if ever do battery ones, and dont really pay attention to how much energy a circuit uses. But I have been playing around with some the kits dad has for his project. Its been a real eye opener!!! staggering what can be done with nA's and the odd burst of 1mA! What shocked me most was putting one of my projects on a test bed, all it does is read a humidity sensor every 15 seconds.
It runs at around 200mA with burst's of around 300mA while reading!! that dosnt sound like much to me, That was until I put the same sensor onto one the energy micro 32 bit boards!!. Even with a very clunky program I dropped it to around 10mA, using there program example tho, I can read the same sensor and run it off a TEG at around 100uA. But the have an example that uses some clever sleep techniques and that draws 4 nA most the time with a couple of bursts of 10uA AND displays a segmented display continuously!!!!
So in light of this, I am going to see what I can get done for an assembly in 2 weeks time, the idea is to get the dev board to do something semi interesting and run it from a TEG and small cap bank.
What I was wondering, seeing as there has been a few posts on energy harvesting etc, how many people spend alot of time getting there code etc tight? and pay close attention to energy used? I think pics are way behind in this regard, yes ok the 32 bit chips can be monitored in real time using REAL ICE and a special header, but generally pic's dont have this function, having seen it in action I am surprised its not a feature. Watching the code live against a graph showing voltage and consumption, really helps. You can the scroll back and place the cursor on the energy peaks and it shows the code line, that was running.
As more and more battery apps become the norm and more energy harvesting is used, I can see this being a big thing for the future. So what are others views? TOY or TOOL??.
Just interested in a discussion with the pro's, on the advantages and disadvantages of these systems. and views on the future of energy harvesting from small sources