Hmm, I thinked I have asked before without too many meaningful answers. Looking at the Tessel2 and their options for powering down the main processor to hibernate and save some power looks very meaningful to me, but there is no really serious talk about low power on the BeagleBone boards.
Whats the cool setup for low power on these linux based systems?
Actually, there is, but it is complicated and not well supported in the kernel. The chipset supports low power, and the PWR_BTN interrupt is wired into the kernel for power off and wake, and there has been some work done on using RTC alarms using the onboard RTC and battery backup, but as far as I can see, none of it is supported in the default kernel. I’ve done a bunch of grepping of the internet on this over the last week or so and all that has told me is that it’s complicated and except for PWR_BTN, not well supported in the kernel.
EDIT: Looks like you can get down to 18mA on a standard BeagleBoard (see the accepted answer toward the bottom) : [url]AM335x Deep Sleep power consumption of Beaglebone Black - Processors forum - Processors - TI E2E support forums