From Milliamperes to Microamperes: Lessons in Low-Power Gadgetmaking
Talk Track One
We want to make objects that delight people — and nothing kills delight faster than a dead battery. In this talk, Joey Castillo will show you how to build devices that sip power by the microwatt, instead of gulping it down by the milliwatt.
We’ll talk about decisions you can make at the very start of your process, including circuit design and component selection, that can have a profound impact on the current draw and battery life of your device. We’ll run power profiling on a gadget that makes some crucial (but plausible!) mistakes, identify those mistakes, and find ways to improve the design.
Then we’ll dive deep into strategies for writing code that makes the most of the available power budget, using real-world examples derived from my work on Sensor Watch, a wristwatch board swap that stretches a 100 milliampere-hour coin cell to a run time of two years or more.
Whether you’re about to embark on a new product design, or you have an existing product out there in the world, you’ll almost certainly walk out of this talk with at least one concrete idea that can reduce its power consumption.
