ALCAM powerdown or sleep available

Archive
1

The ALCAM OEM board uses a comically large amount of power when on, somewhere above 100mA. Shutting down the Camera with “D 1” does a little to improve that consumption between shots, but is there any way to put the main processor on the ALCAM board into a low-power sleep mode?

As an alternative I’ve been trying to kill power to the entire ALCAM board by cutting off its ground with a n MOSFET via an Arduino, but it appears to pull enough parasitic power over the signal lines from the Arduino to keep the ALCAM in some kind of semi-powered state, and upon each restart (turning the MOSFET back on to power the ALCAM) I get SD initialization errors a good portion of the time.

What avenues are there for reducing the power consumption of the ALCAM, or is it simply not cut out to be a long-term battery-powered device?

2

Wet could definitely look into low power options in the future but for now set your arduino pins to inputs when you power off alcam. This prevent for power coming in through the ios.

3

Thank you for the suggestion. I went ahead and set all of my Arduino SPI pins, along with the Arduino pins connected to the BUSY and RESET lines of the ALCAM to inputs after killing power to the ALCAM via the MOSFET, and now the system sits at <1mA sleeping between pictures, which I’m spacing about 30 seconds apart.