Sunday, March 1, 2015

Launchpad can survive on 1000mAh LiPo battery for 1.5 years with Radio Link to RPi board

So after last few days of work on data serialization across Rpi & LaunchPad (MSP430G2553), I integrated the Serialization library that sends couple of 32-bit /16-bit integers from MCU to RPi via NRF24L01+ chip.

Initially MCU was raking around 230uA current . After some tweaking, it came down 130uA .

As final optimization (for this round of testing), I shutdown the NRF24L01+ chip till next time radio-packet-transmission. This step lead to MCU current consumption of 25uA . So in this period (approximate 12 seconds) MCU is in LPM3 sleep-state and radio is in shutdown-state. When MCU wakes-up, it activates NRF chip again & sends radio-packets, during this tx-period, it takes around 400uA for a breif period.


So taking on average current consumption of 50uA (including radio-packet-tx current bump), using battery life calculator for 1000mAh LiPO battery's life is around 14000hours (583 days). Not bad for a starter project :)

I have just documented the initial video for the same at youtube .


I will be submitting the code in github in coming days after stabilization and cleanups.
I will do same test for MSP430F5969 (FRAM board with Super capacitor on it).