Hello Everyone,
I decided to take a dive into battery powered micocontroller systems and i need to know a few details before i go in any further.
Basically how do i design a battery operated microcontroller circuit without the battery discharging quickly.What are the basic requirements?

Here is what i am trying to do .I have a beaglebone black as my master controller which is connected to the wifi.
I want to design a "gate-watch device/sensor", which sends a signal back to the beaglebone whenever the gate is opened or closed.

The sensor will have an IR transmitter and Reciever.(Transmitted connected to the gate),the receiver interfaced with a low power PIC and the PIC is also interfaced with a wifi module(ESP8266).And the complete setup should be battery powered and should last me at least a year.

Would it be possible to make such a extremely low powered sensor?

 

The ESP8266, with standard firmware, very power hungry because
of the length of time it takes coming out of sleep to make up a connection
to transmit data.

But here is an alternative ESP8266 method that looks pretty good -

Regards, Dana.

 

Hi Dana,
Thanks for the link.I will have a look into it and get back.

 

Well--how much power does this IR transmitter need? Presumably it has to operate all the time. Second, how often is the gate opened? If the system turns on its wifi for every gate operation, it makes a big difference if it's doing it once a day, or once every 15 seconds.

If the gate used a magnetic sensor, it might not need any power at all. Put a magnet on the gate and a coil on the post, and every time the gate opens it would generate a voltage spike in the coil (and a negative spike when the gate closes) and the processor could detect that.

 

You may find this podcast interesting: https://theamphour.com/398-an-interview-with-felix-rusu/
His company is LowPowerLab: https://lowpowerlab.com/
Most of his stuff is low power battery operated wireless, some home automation stuff lasts for a couple of years between battery changes. One of the first systems he did was a mail box detection system along the lines of what you are looking to do: https://lowpowerlab.com/guide/motionmote/