Optimize battery use for the Raspberry Pi Pico

Conclusions

With the measures described here, you can reduce the Pico's power consumption to somewhere between 0 and 1mA during idle time, which will significantly extend the battery life. Ultimately, power consumption at wake-up and during the work cycle will then determine the battery life, regardless of your choice of programming language. Again, CircuitPython plays to its strengths, because if you change the chip (e.g., because you need Bluetooth or WiFi), you don't have to learn anything new as far as saving power is concerned.

Infos

  1. Examples for this article: https://github.com/bablokb/pico-sleepcurrent
  2. Adafruit Enable Timer: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3435
  3. C++ wrapper class for sleep modes: https://github.com/ms1963/SleepyPico

The Author

Bernhard Bablok works at Allianz Technology SE as an SAP HR developer. When he's not listening to music or out and about, he's busy with topics related to Linux, programming, and small-board computers. You can contact him at mailto:mail@bablokb.de.

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