Can I Get An Arduino To Run For A Year On A Single 18650 Battery?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 มิ.ย. 2024
- In this video, I'll be looking at a couple of things that can be done to make an Arduino more power efficient, with the aim being to see if we can get an Arduino to run for a whole year on a single charge of an 18650 lithium-ion battery. In my previous video, I found that the 3.3V Arduino Pro Mini was the most power-efficient, and managed to get it to run for just under 4 months. So we're looking at getting it to run at least 3 times longer in this video.
For the full write up, with additional information and the table of results for both the 4200mAh and 3500mAh batteries, follow this link - www.the-diy-life.com/can-i-ge...
Arduino Pro Mini 5V - amzn.to/3avnAhT
Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V - amzn.to/2Cwemp6
Here are links to the batteries and the multimeter used in the video as well:
4000mAh 18650 Lithium Ion Batteries - amzn.to/321c1LJ
Fluke 17B+ Multimeter - amzn.to/3g4txnl - แนวปฏิบัติและการใช้ชีวิต
Very good insights, Thanks for the video
Thank you sir for sharing this information.
Thanks, this was a great video.
Would love to see one with other modules attached like a GPS and RF or GSM one, just to see how those affect the power consumption.
Currently working on a pet tracker right now and want to see how long it would last before having to replace the batteries.
Thanks Akiru's Lab. I'm sure the GPS module would make a significant impact on power consumption. The GSM module too, although this could be turned on and off as needed.
@@MichaelKlements you can make use of the sleep modes of the applicable modules. Can suggest the quectel L80 GPS (fairly low current) and the little Sim800L gsm module. I have a little video on my channel checking power consumption on similar modules (my L80 gps module has just arrived and am starting to test)
Your videos are implemented better than mine so not keen to make another one! I think a lot of people would be interested in this kind of project especially as it’s low power.
That's quite impressive getting a GPS module and GSM module running on an Arduino and only using 7.5mA! I'll definitely have a look at them, this has a lot of potential for mobile tracking devices and even small drones and autonomous vehicles.
@@MichaelKlements
The sleep current should be lower with the L80 gps, running current is definitely lower. I have some mosfets on order to remove main power from the gps but leave backup power connected which should lower sleep current to around 1-3 Ma. Currently I can send gsm model a text command which wakes the Sim800L, interrupts the pro mini from deep sleep, parses the command to see what to do next e.g. wake the GPS or turn on power to the GPS, get a fix then return coordinates by sms with a google maps link then all go back to sleep. Also have a separate interrupt for the pro mini to add a tilt switch, when closed will send an sms alerting movement. That can be turned on and off by txting a command to the Sim800L.
Seems to work quite well. Working on getting notified when battery gets low and what to do about it.
Muy interesante la información, Thanks.
Thank you!
what about using a solid state capacitor and a teeny weeny solar cell? or maybe even a RF power harvester that takes power from sorrounding radio signals? you could have some pretty cool sensors in remote places logging data, and maybe even once a year upload it all by saving up power to connect a gsm module and text it
Thanks for the great ideas. I haven't ever considered using an RF power harvester, I'll look into it. The capacitor running with a solar cell is also a neat idea for a Pro Mini.
Awesome! Very good explanation. Can you try it with coin battery?
I didn't know they could go that low. Pretty impressive. If you haven't already you should check out the STM32 L0 range.
Thanks for the tip, I’ll definitely go and have a look at their range! Yeah they’ve taken a pretty good chip and ruined it’s power saving abilities with poor quality components. Then again, Arduino are generally designed to be as cheap as possible, rather than reliable or power saving.
@@MichaelKlements Arduino are designed to be cheap to manufacture, but are sold for ten times more. Well, I can understand they host forums, publish guides, make Arduino ide which I presonally don't like, but fine. I've seen that bare atmega328p chip can consume 300nA with ADC, BOD and some other stuff disabled, pins put into output and either high or low state - this has hardly any effect in sleep (can be last few uAs), but it can save a lot when it's awake. Also I don't like having LED on SPI CLK pin and that my Arduino Nano has LEDs that can be used in imperial star destroyer lasers, they are so bright that it hurts.
Other than that yes. I would actually like to have ATmega4809 chip with break-out board, reset button and necessary capacitors. That's it. Then a separate programmer, cause this chip has some single wire communication for programming.
On the other hand, for some people it might be nice to power Arduino and stepper motors from a single 12V adapter.
Other funny part is ZS-042 RTC module, it needs three modifications: power led, charging circuit that is badly designed and to remove one pull up resistor on interrupt pin.
great video, about the discharge thing, if you use a tiny solar panel, it will compensate?
Yes it would, if you've got your project in a location with light/sunlight
Lithium battery have an internal resistance, which means they will self discharge slowly over time, good luck making it last a year!
They do slowly lose their charge, but this usually takes 2-3 years if you're using good quality batteries (I release the ones in the video are not).
You dont know what your talking about mate. 1-2% a month thats one of big advantage over lead acid.
I would use solar panel to charge small lipo battery
Well explained video thanks. How about adding a more efficient LDO regulator like an MCP1700?
I haven't gotten around to trying out a regulator replacement, but it's definitely something I'd like to try. I'll have a look at the MCP1700!
@@MichaelKlements after quite a lot of research the MCP1700 has good output current, low dropout voltage and low quiescent current. Have just received some but not tested yet.
They look like a good option. Did you buy the surface mount ones and are they the same footprint as the original regulator?
@@MichaelKlements
I have bought a few of the surface mount and also through hole type, unfortunately the footprint is not the same as the original regulator on the pro mini which is a shame. I was thinking of making a carrier board pcb for all modules to be soldered to, also to design it as compact as possible.
Yeah that's a shame. I'll probably get some of the through hole type then, it should be easier to bend their legs to fit the surface mount pads.
Great experiment, but what would you use this for, ie temperature or data collection, which is more realistic
Thanks Jerry. There are quite a few instances where you might want the Arduino to run a long time on batteries.
I initially thought about making it more efficient for my soil moisture monitoring stick. If you’re forgetting to water the plants then you’re going to forget to replace/recharge batteries as well!
But it’s also great for data logging, external weather stations, RFID locks etc.
@@MichaelKlements So what capacity batteries and how long do they last on your soil monitor
Why removing the regulator when you can power the board using VCC pin directly. I suppose the regulator will be unused in this case right? no need to remove it
Can arduino wakeup when there is interrupt from outside sensor? Is it possible to detect interrupt from a sensor such as moisture change when it's in sleep mode?
Yes, there are options in the lower power library to put the chip to sleep and wake on an external interrupt. You wouldn't be able to do it for something like an analogue sensor though, as the Arduino would need to constantly monitor the values to know that they're changing or reaching a limit. The interrupts are more for step changes or switches.
But soil moisture changes so slowly that you could wake up every hour or two for a single reading and you'd be getting much better battery life.
0.06mA work with out slep mode how day work? lithium 2700
5:16 if you bypassed the power conditioner by hooking up to VCC, why did you have to remove it?
On one schematics of internals, it had voltage divider there to compare output against reference, i'm not sure if it's a case of voltage regulator used on this particular pro mini.
if it is connected to the relay module, is it possible? and whether the current increases or remains. My plan is to use a 12 volt motorcycle battery with a capacity of 5 amperes. thanks
Yes you could use a relay to turn it on and off, this method allows the Arduino to stay on and is intended more for data logging or long term projects than for an application where it could be turned off for periods of time.
After removing the regulator, I hook 3.7v lithium to VCC (battery powered project). So now all the sensor/oled connect to VCC is powered directly with battery? 3.7v battery is 4.2v when fully charge, is this later will damage my oled/sensors?
It depends on what the sensors and display you're using can handle. Typically I2C OLED displays can be powered at 3.3V or 5V so if you're powering it with a 3.7V battery (up to 4.2V) then this shouldn't cause any issues.
@@MichaelKlements there is also DS3231 RTC hook on the VCC too. The downside i think, i cant measure battery drop
You could remove the regulator and power it with a Lifepo4 at 700 mah battery at 3.2 volts AA size
Yes you can do that too.
Hey what happens when you removed the onboard voltage regulator? if nothing happens then why is it present on the board in the first place??... Thanks for answering!!
The regulator maintains a constant 3.3V supply to the chip and peripherals, for a broad range of input voltages (typically up to 12V). If you are using a 3.7V lithium ion battery then this is sufficiently close to 3.3V that the chip will run without risk of damage and you can use it for digital IO etc.. You can't use more than one battery and your analogue inputs or any devices attached to your Arduino that require a stable 3.3V voltage will probably not be reliable. So it limits your use cases. I have made a subsequent video on replacing the regulator with a much more efficient one for these cases.
@@MichaelKlements Superb explaination!!Thanks
Hi, i have a question.I am a newb by the way. I just want to do a kitchen counter. there is only 2 buttons. one counts down from 30 minutes and the other counts down from 10 minutes.(only a small oled will be up during countdowns, other times it will be off) After time is up, it only blinks a led for a couple of seconds. Initially i thought it wont require much power so a battery would feed it for months but as i can see, it wont. So the question is how would you do such a system? would you use battery or outlet? or should i put a button which totally turns on and off the arduino? and do you advice raspberry pi pico because they say it is more energy efficient.
If you're only using it intermittently then you can probably get away with battery power, just use a power button or switch as you've suggested so that the Arduino is not powered the whole time. An Arduino. According to the data I can find, the Pico uses around 90mA when running which is significanlty more than you can get an Arduino Pro mini to run at with some modifications.
@@MichaelKlements ok. thanks for your answer. i will look into it tomorrow. i am thinking of putting a switch on 9v cable. i will see but early on will it get up immediately or there will be some delay seconds until i am able to use counter. and most importantly, is there any chance for that scenario: when i press the 10 minute count down button, the arduino will turn on if it is off. the same for the 30 minute button?
Very nice experiments illustrating how to minimize power consumption in sleep mode! I found myself wondering about differences among board designs in power consumption during operation; e.g., running a continuous loop involving floating point computations, reading analog inputs, changing digital I/O pin states, etc. If there are differences among the boards you compared in your first video, their magnitude could also be a factor in board selection for a given project.
Thanks John. That’s a good idea to take a look at next. The results would probably be more significant for the smaller boards like the Pro Mini and Pro Micro as these already use a lot less power than the Uno and Mega. I’ll start thinking of some ideas to test this out.
@@MichaelKlements From what I can see the selection would likely come down to Pro Mini v Nano, and if there isn't too much difference, I think I'd prefer to use the Nano (which I have several of).
It would also be interesting to look at the genuine Arduino branded Nano vs a clone Nano, as the clones often use poor quality components (particularly regulators)
@@MichaelKlements I'm thinking along the lines of bypassing the regulator and using off-board regulation through a Pololu device I have previous experience with, their S9V11F3S5C3, which is a step-up, step-down with a cutoff at 3VDC, perfect for an 18650. it can output up to 1.5A. As is, it outputs 3.3VDC but has a jumper you can bridge to output 5.0 VDC. I've measured its efficiency at > 90% as they claim. So I'm thinking of using this with an 18650 instead of USB power, preferably at 3.3VDC. I could try it at both voltages to see the consumption difference in both sleep mode and in the awake state. I'd use a p channel mosfet to switch power to sensors during read cycles. Anyway you're video has caused me to become interested in playing around with this a bit. Information on the Pololu regulator, if your interested, is at www.pololu.com/product/2873
That sounds like a nice solution. I'll definitely have a look at it!
How to put it in sleep mode? I have Arduino pro micro. Is it a library?
Yes there is a low power library - it's linked in my blog post in the video description
I love to see a pair of wired headphones converted to use an 18650 battery and a wireless bt module
I’ll have a look at this, it sounds like an interesting project.
The LED Blinking Test does not make any sense, because the current spike will get lost while calculating the average of the power that gets used.
That's the whole point of the LED blinking. I want something that indicates that the Arduino is still running, but doesn't influence (or has as little influence as possible) the power consumption.
sorry by the self discharge of a 18650 is definitely not a year. its about 1-2% a month. That would last 5-10 years that is without a BMS of course.
If we make a solar charger will it run forever? In theory I mean
As long as your solar charger is able to harvest enough energy in the 5-8 hours of direct sunlight it gets a day to power the Arduino for 24 hours or more then yes it would be able to run indefinitely.
@@MichaelKlements I live in greece we have plenty of sunlight even during the winter so it may be able to work
@@tyflos098 i am using wemos d1 mini with wifi connection and thermometer and it runs "forever" in Poland (we do not have so many sunny days as you have). It registers temperature, humidity and atm. press. every 5 minutes. runs on one 18650 and two 6v 1W solar panels. sends data over mqtt to my raspberry. wifi is not very power efficient so i think that such small arduino and RF would be way more efficient
@@daczka92 It might be interesting to have indeed each arduino with a RF instead of wifi, all sending data to a single RF receiver, which relay information through wifi ? I was thinking about doing that but I have no experience with RF and might not realize the drawbacks
4200mah 18650? where?
The battery capacity is obviously overstated by the manufacturer, but that's not really the point of the video. Even a 1500mAh battery would power an Arduino for years.
The moment you need to Pass the information about the Battery charge to future generations.
Imagen you need to tell your Son, so he can tell his Son to charge the battery when he is old enugh.
Haha
most likelly li-on will be self discharger after 4-8months.. or if you recharging the battery will fail after 2-4 years
i have never seen a 18650 more than 3ah and in real life they are 2900 brand new. after 6 months it goes lower than 2600. all i want to say is lithium 18650 are not realiable. they are made to replace them more often than you might think..
As a hearing impaired youtube viewer, I am a little bit confused as to why you removed the regulator. I thought, regulator is to run current around the board and the battery to feed the battery to regulate the power by feeding it back and forth. How is that possible to run the battery to board without regulator. I mean, without regulator, the power from battery will drain. The same principle as the car run using battery and Alternator. I have been helping peoples understanding why their battery went bad by draining based on two things: The battery and Alternator that goes bad. I am a little baffled on what you did on regulator on Arduino. Thank you for your insights on it.
The regulator stabilises the voltage from the battery. A battery starts off at say 4.2V full charged and this decreases over time to around 3.4V when empty. The regulator takes this input voltage from the battery and keeps it at 5V or 3.3V regardless of the variation from the battery.
While not ideal for sensors, the Atmega chip can handle some variation in voltage, as can LEDs and buttons etc.. So if you're not working with sensitive sensors then you can remove the regulator without affecting performance and you'll save on power consumption - regulators use energy in converting the voltage and when in standby. The components onboard only use what power they require, they don't drain the battery any more or less without a regulator.
People's car batteries go bad due to the alternator because the alternator stops charging the battery properly. So the battery slowly drains more and more until it it eventually dies. Batteries, particularly car batteries, don't like being empty for extended periods of time. This damages them.
The only thing we need to do now is to create a battery that lasts 100 years >.
Haha, it seems like battery technology is always a bit behind
just pls, dont brake off smd components with pliers, u can kill the board.
Its not something I would usually do, but it's a $3 board and LEDs tend to break before the PCB traces are damaged.
@@MichaelKlements yeah true. its just, kind a pain for the eyes, like ripping off some componetns. but i need to say, really impressive, how little energy is used. thx for this vid.
Yeah I agree, I bought a small SMD hot plate shortly after this video that I've been using.
your 4200 mah 18650 is a fake
bull shit. 42oomah