VOXL2 board power consumption and sleep mode

[frafrat]

Hello,

I need more information regarding the power consumption of the VOXL2 board so that I can try to extend the battery life that powers the board whenever possible.

How much power does the VOXL2 board consume in idle mode? Is there a way to reduce the energy consumption of the board by putting the QRB5165 in sleep mode and waiting for an external event to wake it up? Is there a detailed datasheet of the QRB5165 chip that I can look at?

Any info will be highly appreciated,

Thank you very much for your time

[Vinny]

Hi @frafrat
It depends on what you have plugged in to the Voxl2 board. It's easy to use an external power supply for a board only setup (no BLDC motors) and run your use cases and read back the current your power supply shows.
We do not do this often since we make a development platform, and all customers use it differently. Moreover, we also do not feel the need to characterize an "idle" state since it is literally a 3rd or 4th order power consumption value compared to any simple actuation (motors or servos). The on-board LEDs are the dominate factor in idle, using about 5mA each at 3.3V and 5V.
My supply, with running nothing and just having an ADB connection pulls about 0.4W, but 0.1W of that is LEDs and I'm positive the rest is power supply efficiency losses, and we do not enter any sleep states especially with keeping ADB up and running the default voxl-suite.
It's likely faster for you to test your setup than to explain to us what your system is and how you wish to use it.
I think one of our SW team members was exploring some of the sleep states, but we just never saw the need to really enter them.
We have many tools in Voxl-suite to monitor running programs, so if you do this, I would recommend trying to understand what is running in "idle" and as you try to disable stuff, you can see the power consumption impact and compare against what functions you need to keep alive for your application.
We cannot share the actual QRB5165 data sheet. Perhaps if you join the Qualcomm Developer Network, you might be able to get some more data directly from there.
If you need further help, please ask.