Recently, I was working on a energy harvesting experiment where I was trying to test various solar cell with indoor lighting conditions and was also checking how much is the light intensity at various location in our office using Lux Meter.
I got curious and quickly created a setup to test the power consumption of the Lux meter.
I was surprised to see the power consumption.
Let me show you how I set it up.
I removed the cells and I used Owon Power Supply to give 4.5V DC as you can see Lux meter uses 3x AAA cells which will produce 4.5V
In the series, I connected NanoRanger to measure the current accurately.
I was surprised to see it was consuming a few 10s of nano amps and not even a few uA. that’s like a very good design.
See the short video clip.
Whenever designing a battery powered equipment and have a power off mode, make sure you have least possible current consumption when in stand by / off mode (if not possible to make it zero).
I have seen many instruments / products consume 10 to 100s of uA while in OFF/Standby mode. You can check my video on Fluke Multimeter I did couple of months back.
This was a quick experiment and I thought it would be interesting for you to also know the results.
If you are also working on energy harvesting or battery powered product, I would love to speak to you.
I hope you found this post useful.
If you have any feedback, you can share in the comments section or you can also contact me directly.
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