3 ms·
It's the radio that is consuming most of the power. Even using your IR transmitter to send a short burst every 5 minutes wouldn't be as much power as if you ha
by zild3d 9y ago
It's the radio that is consuming most of the power.
Even using your IR transmitter to send a short burst every 5 minutes wouldn't be as much power as if you had an IR receiver that had to listen to incoming signals. But still, start using the IR transmitter every 5 minutes and you'll see a dent in battery life
- trelliscoded 9y agoIt's true, and radio technology has a lot of inefficiencies in the analog bits. Digital RF techniques help, but the Rx amplifier and downconverters, mixers, and stuff all lose a lot of energy in the process. Also, the watch has a clock frequency measured in kilohertz, and the processor is probably some dumb as rocks 8051 variant or something with a tiny amount of static RAM. Big difference in power consumption compared to a 32-bit ARM core. Cortex-M0s are pretty competitive with that power regime though these days, especially if your application (like the watch) will allow you to run the M0 at sub-1MHz speeds.