Re: Which embedded devices do you use?

[Philip Munts <philip.munts@gmail.com>]

I don't have my engineering notebook with me and so I'm working from memory.  I recall measuring 70 mA for a Raspberry Pi Zero (not Wireless).  That's idle sitting at a command line and is pretty consistent with this site:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/raspberry-pi-zero-power

I haven't measured a PocketBeagle's current consumption, but I imagine it would be similar.  A very quick scan of Google search results suggests 80 mA or so.

It would be a very interesting experiment to downclock a Pi Zero as much as possible to see how much power consumption can be reduced.

As it is, I sometimes run Raspberry Pi's on some 1000 mAh Lithium USB batteries  for classes and demonstrations and that would yield on the order of 10 hours for a Raspberry Pi Zero.

One challenge to reducing power performance is actually the on-board RAM, which often consumes a large fraction of the power budget.  Both the Raspberry Pi Zero and PocketBeagle, with 512 MB of RAM, are at sort of a sweet spot for performance, space, power consumption, and cost.

There are Linux computer modules that are smaller, like the LinkIt Smart 7688, with less RAM and potentially lower power consumption, but then it gets really hard to fit interesting and useful software.