LowPowerLab Forum
Hardware support => RF - Range - Antennas - RFM69 library => Topic started by: ChemE on September 11, 2016, 09:48:14 AM
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I've had a look through this forum as well as some searches and I find nothing regarding anyone monkeying with the packet format to reduce how long a battery-powered mote must spend in its highest power state; transmitting. Page 52 of the datasheet (http://"http://www.hoperf.com/upload/rf/RFM69W-V1.3.pdf") makes it seem that payloads can be as small as 1 byte. To send back temperature and humidity as integers I think the payload can be as small as 2 bytes (1 byte to encode the temperature from -128 to 128F and 7 bits to encode the RH from 0 to 100). Adding sync words, length, address, network etc represents a significant increase in payload and thus power consumption. I recall reading some thoughts/discussion over at Jeelabs about changing the RFM12B packet structure to shave a few bytes out of the payload. Has anyone done the same with the RFM69W* or am I striking out into new territory? Using these awesome new TPL5110s means my power budget is strongly affected by my transmit time now that my sleep current is 38nA. Not a bad problem to have!
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@ChemE,
Trimming back the preamble will start to affect the ability of the bit slicer to "lock in" to the incoming stream. Difficult to test since if the Tx & Rx xtals are *perfectly* aligned, you won't see this effect.
If your loop budget is adequate, why not increase the baud rate? Just parameter changes, no code changes - microcoulombs consumed inversely proportional to the baud rate.
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I absolutely agree emjay and plan on going up to 300kbps baud rate for precisely this reason. Still, I know a great many folks have no problems running at 300kbps so why stop there? Trimming bytes out of the payload offers the next best path to power reduction (it would seem).