[Tinyos-devel] more bugging about current consumption on MicaZ in tinyos-2.x

[Eric Weddington]

Philip Levis wrote:
> On Jul 19, 2006, at 10:30 AM, Joe Polastre wrote:
> 
>>> MicaZ deep sleep draw: 3-5uA
>>> Telos deep sleep draw: 7uA
>>
>>
>> See my previous message.  You should lift the Vcc pin on the
>> microcontroller to accurately measure the MCU current draw, which will
>> be about 0.7uA in deep sleep.  The rest is due to having to isolate
>> the USB circuitry (which isn't present on a MicaZ)
>>
>> Now, of course, you wouldn't deploy the Telos, as is with USB, in a
>> large scale situation.  Too big and not cost effective.
> 
> 
> I was trying to measure the *platform* current draw, not the MCU.  
> Clearly you could create a custom platform for long-term deployments,  
> but I was wondering how platforms --- off the shelf --- match up.

Thanks everyone for taking the time to get this information. In 
retrospect, I think I was interested in both sets of information, 
platforms, as well as MCU.

Being new to the area of wireless sensor networks, I've been wondering 
about the idea of "off the shelf" platforms. How hard is it to introduce 
a new design? And now for the obvious bias: Specifically, how hard is it 
to introduce a new design with the new Atmel AT86RF230 radio? and 
possibly an ATmega1281? It would be interesting to stack it up against 
the current "off the shelf" platforms.

Joe and I had an interesting conversation about this at the last ZigBee 
Open House in SJ a few weeks ago.

Thanks
Eric Weddington