PowerSaving cutting

[Martin Tellblom]

Starting with my first battery powered sensor and I got the Soil Moisture sensor running 8,5 hours and just used 10% of the battery
So probably I water the flower every 3rd day when i replaces the batteries

Joke aside I really need to save some powerand the first thing I like to do is remove the LED and power regulator from the board.

My boards that I have doesn't look like the once in the guide and I don't really know where to cut to disable the power regulator
The red cut is the LED but should I cut at the green or the yellow?
The yellow is connected to Vcc 3.3V pin and the green cut is Vcc from the FTDI.
I think I should cutthe green one but I'm not sure

And the second thing If I use the sleep(very long number) is the Pro Mini going down in real sleep mode or do I have to do something else?

[chrille]

@Martin-Tellblom said:

My boards that I have doesn't look like the once in the guide and I don't really know where to cut to disable the power regulator
The red cut is the LED but should I cut at the green or the yellow?
The yellow is connected to Vcc 3.3V pin and the green cut is Vcc from the FTDI.
I think I should cutthe green one but I'm not sure

And the second thing If I use the sleep(very long number) is the Pro Mini going down in real sleep mode or do I have to do something else?

The Pro Mini's I have seen have two LED's - one is connected to VCC and the other to one of the GPIO pins. The one that lights up, as soon as the board is turned on, is the one to cut! You can leave the other one in place. As for cutting the regulator, I really don't see the purpose of doing that.
I have a chinese Pro Mini clone, where I cut the power LED, and nothing else. It's powered by 2x cheap AA batteries and reports every 30 seconds. Every report consists of a battery voltage, temperature and a combinered temperature/humidity measurement. It's been running 4 months and two days, and so far the battery voltage have dropped to 2.97V

If you use the sleep() function in a MySensors sketch it will put both the processor and the radio to sleep.

[Martin Tellblom]

Thank you, I try that first.
I cut the red LED and let the blue one be (since it just blinks a couple of times when starting up)

[sundberg84]

@Martin-Tellblom said:

Thank you, I try that first.
I cut the red LED and let the blue one be (since it just blinks a couple of times when starting up)

I would just desolder the led and volt. regulator. I find it harder to cut and I have destroyed some doing so.