Increase battery life from 6 weeks to a year on Arduino

One of the biggest goals for developers in coding and designing battery powered devices is minimizing power waste, especially within the IoT space by using Otii.

In this video, we show you how to reduce power waste on an Arduino Pro Mini clone in a few simple steps. This is one of the Arduino models that gets you closest to what the Atmel ATmega328P microcontroller can achieve in terms of low power.

We use the Blink sketch and modify it to show improvements with lower clock speed, putting the controller to sleep, as well as some quick hardware modifications.

For this simple sketch you can bring the average power consumption down by almost a factor 10; from 6.5 mA to 0.75 mA, or from 6 weeks battery time to a full year!

Here is how we minimized Arduino power consumption.