Curently my Node is invoked every 10 minutes and sends back the Battery state in step 6. I monitor the data in Grafana on my Pi to make a 3 months test on reliability.
I have the following questions:
1. How much uA additional power will Listen Mode use? This is hard to measure because in Listenmode I have no constant power consumption as in WDT deep sleep only.
(WDT deep sleep is now 4-6 uA with 3V/8Mhz Moteino) I have RFM69HW.
2. How reliable is ListenMode in your experience?
Could I run a Node for 12 months in that way given a reliable Power source? Or it is better to wakeup the Node from time to time also with WDT timeout instead sleep forever and relying ListenMode wakup only?
Hi René,
I have not extensively used ListenMode yet myself, but I know people who have.
It is reliable and for a high reliability requirement, you can always implement a WDT reset if the node locks up, this would also prevent any bugs in your code to freeze the node.
How much current is hard to really tell, but you can estimate based on the duty cycle of the RX vs Sleep time. RX is about 15mA just for the radio module, and add the MCU, another 8mA-12mA depending what it does and if it runs at full speed. In sleep you can achieve very low power - 2uA in "forever sleep" or 6-7uA using WDT sleep (periodic wakeup). These numbers are valid for Moteino not other platforms which I am not really familiar with.
I was hoping others who used ListenMode could chime in and add their experience.