Now that i managed to put an XBee ZB module to sleep, all i had left to do was being able to put the RBBB to sleep for a certain amount of time (and have it wake up again!).  It would be very nice if i could use 2 triggers for waking up the controller: based on a predefined interval and by some external source (for example an attached motion detector that detects motion).

Low-power Zigbee & Arduino

Both are actually equally important, so i tossed a coin with the outcome that i started with trying to accomplish to wake up the RBBB on a predefined interval. I found an article that pretty much did what i wanted. The maximum time that the Watchdog Timer can power down the microcontroller is 8 seconds, after which it will wake up again and carry on with it’s job. I modified some things so that the power down routine is called multiple times, which results in a power down mode in multples of 8 seconds. Currently the wake up interval is set at 32 (4*8) seconds and it has run flawlessly for 16 hours now. I still have to dig in deeper to the Watchdog code see if my ‘modifications’ can be made more efficient, but for now this will be OK.

Now i wonder what the power consumption of this combination of RBBB and Zigbee module is… should i let it run on a battery and wait till it stops? How long will that be…. no; i think it’s better to find a way to estimate battery life by actually measuring the power consumption. That will probably mean i will need extra hardware and tools.