ESP32 Forum

I have a Sparkfun ESP32 Thing and while it advertises a deep sleep current usage of 2.5uA, I actually measured around 950uA when I put it into deep sleep (after disabling the power LED - with the LED it is about 2.5mA). I found others have reported similar results in this thread on the Sparkfun forum. A user there actually suggests a modification can be made to add a pull up resistor to the SPI Flash chip to achieve 75uA current usage. However, this is still quite far from the 5uA I have seen other ESP32 owners report.

In this YouTube video the pcbreflux guy measures a mere 5uA when running his ESP32 in deep sleep. When I measured 950uA, I had deployed the same program to run the board in deep sleep with a timer wake up as used in this video.

I wonder, why does the SparkFun Thing not include a pull up resistor on the SPI Flash chip? Why does the board still consume 75uA even with this modification? What other differences between manufacturer's boards can account for different levels of power consumption? What manufacturer would you recommend for low power usage?

The video is measuring the current of just the module. As stated in the thread, sparkfun regulator consume 55ua. Sparkfun design was one of the first, along with pycom boards, and good hw design information was not available at the time, deep sleep functions were not ready for testing, so the designs were suboptimal. The official wroom modules are able to completely power off the flash due to design differences.

So use a board with an official module and a regulator with low Iq or build your own.