I got a off-the-shelf circuit (china) that runs off 12v, and will turn on / off a switch. Works great, AND... it drains my battery! It draws 30mA continuously. I need to be down at maybe 1 mA average power draw.

I don't mind laying out a little circuit with the relay/regulator/etc. But I'd like to get a ethernet 'module' that I can just solder to my circuit. Trying to find one is making the back of my eyes hurt!

So, any recommendations? Nothing fancy needed, it's not a life-critical switch, just something to make life a little easier. Basic wifi, not really worried about one band vs another. Thank you in advance!

 

I think getting a WiFi circuit to work continuously on only 1mA (12mW) is a stretch.
Perhaps you could duty-cycle the power (e.g. 100ms on and 3s off) to reduce the average power.
That presumes the circuit can activate and respond to a WiFi signal in 100ms.
And, of course, that would cause up to a 3 second delay for the circuit to respond.

What's the Ah rating of your battery?

 

I think getting a WiFi circuit to work continuously on only 1mA (12mW) is a stretch.
Perhaps you could duty-cycle the power (e.g. 100ms on and 3s off) to reduce the average power.
That presumes the circuit can activate and respond to a WiFi signal in 100ms.
And, of course, that would cause up to a 3 second delay for the circuit to respond.

What's the Ah rating of your battery?

It is a 5 a-hr battery. So right now at 30mA, it draws .72 amps a day. Lead acid battery, so want to limit drawdown to 50%.. So that is only 3.5 days. With bad weather, I'd like at least a few weeks of power. Upsizing the battery is not an option. I have a solar panel on it now, and I could double it's size, but in bad weather it'd still be an issue.

There are lots of things out there that are wifi and run on small batteries, like security cameras. How do they work on really small power budgets? Surely... something exists!

 

Welcome to AAC.

You should look for a BLE solution. Wi-Fi will never be "low power" in the way you need.

 

What maximum distance of response do you need?

 

This is going to be out in the yard, so it does need good range. BLE won't work, it does need to be ethernet.

So let me ask, how does other wifi stuff run on really low power? Like cell phones. Do they turn on/off the wifi to save power? Same for security cameras. I put in some solar wireless security cameras at my church. They have maybe a 1 watt solar panel. They run just fine in "motion activated" mode. But if I put them on continuous record, they do drain down. Ok, I get that. But this is a device that will be just monitoring, and I can click remotely on my phone to turn something off/on once or twice a day (at unknown times...). Crutschow said the idea of turning off 90% of the time, does anyone know how long a wifi device needs to be 'on' to check to see if it's getting a ping? Again, thanks in advance for educating me...

 

how does other wifi stuff run on really low power? Like cell phones.

Not really low power.
The take about 0.1W when idle.

Look at this Google search to see if anything looks like it would meet your needs.