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Lower power consumption when starting wifi

Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2019 11:57 am
by RonvdPlas
Hello,

I'm trying to lower the power consumption of the ESP32 when connected to WiFi.
Ideally i would like it run beneath 250 mA with small peaks to 300 mA because my power supply is limited.
For normal operation i can make it to run stable by lowering the TX power and setting the power safe mode, however i can only change these values when the wifi stack has already been started (so after esp_wifi_start).
During the start sequence i'm measuring a big spike in current. So the result is that i get a brownout because my power supply is limited (for this application i can't change the supply).

I'm wondering if somebody would know if this big spike while starting the wifi stack (esp_wifi_start()) can be limited. My guessing it uses the default TX power during this sequence, and after that i can change it to a lower power.

Thanks in advance!

Re: Lower power consumption when starting wifi

Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2019 6:50 pm
by kermitfuckingfrog
What's wrong in this forum? So many views but nobody gives a shit and replies.. what a shitty website.

So you could just put a capacitor in parallel to ur ESP-Board. 5V---CAPACITOR---GND

100µF µF should be enough to supply enough current during the "spikes".

Re: Lower power consumption when starting wifi

Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2019 1:50 am
by WiFive

Re: Lower power consumption when starting wifi

Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2019 8:54 am
by RonvdPlas
kermitfuckingfrog wrote: What's wrong in this forum? So many views but nobody gives a shit and replies.. what a shitty website.

So you could just put a capacitor in parallel to ur ESP-Board. 5V---CAPACITOR---GND

100µF µF should be enough to supply enough current during the "spikes".
Thanks, I'm working on a new hardware design and will try around with some capacitors.
WiFive wrote: Did you try no calibration? https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp ... ation.html
I'll give it a shot!

Re: Lower power consumption when starting wifi

Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2019 1:02 pm
by Crypth
Having a bit of the same problem. When the signal is bad, the chip brownouts a lot. Did you solve the problem?

What debug log levels are necessary to verify if it does a full or partial calibration?