15 Apr
2012
15 Apr
'12
7:24 p.m.
On Apr 15, 2012, at 9:56 PM, Mouse wrote:
I should point out that I've been rather scrupulous of late in
trimming my lines down (though since my mail client doesn't support
even a column count or right margin, it's largely guesswork). The
line you trimmed there was from a quote from someone else; I'm not
particularly interested in hunting through the mail I'm quoting to
reduce the line length.
True. I'm sure it's possible to get lower-power than a 555, too, in
the non-processor solution space. I was really comparing the
first-reaction "use a processor" solution to the first-reaction "use
discretes and maybe simple LSI" solution.
Indeed. The 555 is a great solution to a great many things, and
much more appropriate than a processor for a lot of things PICs
get used for. It's not the lowest-power IC, but it's simple and
does analog things that a CPU has a hard time with. And you can
draw out the schematic for it on one page of notebook paper; I
somewhat doubt you could do the same with even Arduino BASIC
code to do the same thing (maybe not; I don't use it much).
>> Then
someone mentioned doing it with an Arduino or something of
>> that ilk. But, on investigating, the uP solution would have drawn
>> enough power to significantly impair battery life as compared to my
>> circuit. Apparently my first reaction was the righter answer. :)
> I wanted a slave flash trigger which would be compact, and smart enough to $
Please don't use paragraph-length lines. I wanted a slave flash trigger [...]. My design used
a small PIC,
[...]. It runs for months on a single CR2032, [...]
Yes, but an Arduino is seldom
part of that solution space for the
low-power domain. The camera drew enough power that a milliamp this way
or that in
control circuit draw was pretty much ignorable, though, so there was
little incentive to put more human time into improving it, especially
in view of the limited amount of improvement that was even possible.
Well, that's the important thing, no? For me, the requirement
for the PIR sensor was to run off a coin cell for as long as
possible. Sounds like you didn't have quite such stringent
requirements.
- Dave