Recently I’ve been able to put my hands on a FEZ Spider kit and I wanted to know if there is a way to enable or disable modules through software. What I mean is: is there a way to, for example, deactivate the display module while it isn’t needed and turn it on when it is needed?
I wanted to know that because deactivating peripherals would be a nice way to save up some battery on an embedded project. I know it is possible to hibernate the microcontroller, but I wanted to be able to deactivate peripherals as well.
I searched around and wasn’t able to find infos about this anywhere, sorry if that has already been answered in the forum.
Modules such is button or joystick are passive, this means they do not draw any power. For modules like LCD or cell, the low power feature should be implemented in the module driver. In short, low power is not necessarily part of the gadgeteer core.
The good news is that almost all modules drivers are open source, which means this can be added if it is not implemented.
I messed around with the drivers a bit, mainly with the Display T35. I searched through its driver and its parent class’ (DisplayModule) as well and I was unable to find any kind of power control for just the module, though I found ways of rebooting and changing the power level of the microcontroller.
Before I search further in the drivers, is it possible to control the power level through drivers at all? If it is, will I need to control the hardware at a lower level, lower than the driver implemented with C#?
Another question, I’m using Visual Studio Professional, and before I was using Visual Studio Express, in both cases I only have the option to create a .NET Gadgeteer Application, I don’t have the option to create a .NET Gadgeteer Module or the other options that should be available.