New Product – Grove PowerSave – Turn Grove Devices Off and On

 

Grove PowerSave – Control Grove Device Power with your Computer.  Shut off the power to specific Grove devices for power on reset reboots and also to reduce power consumption for solar powered systems.  It is 3.3V and 5V compatible.

 

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Features

What does the GroverPowerSave Do?

The GrovePowerSave switches the VDD line of the attached (to the Out Port) Grove device.   This removes power from the attached device, thus reducing the power the device consumes.    Solar Power Projects will often want to turn off devices and sensors when they aren’t being used (the SwitchDoc Labs Air Quality Sensor is an example – it uses 50mA even when not being accessed) and other devices such as the Grove OLED device (which uses about 25mA in general).

Project Curacao2, a solar powered environmental system, makes use of three of these GrovePowerSave devices (Air Quality Sensor, LoRa WXLink Receiver and the Grove OLED Display) to save a total of 150mA during the period of time when the system is not using these devices, greatly stretching battery life.  Project Curacao2 also makes use of USB PowerControl to switch of the WiFi Dongle when it is not being used for an additional saving of 80mA.

This reduces the power consumption of Project Curacao from 420 to just over 200mA (and another 50 mA can be saved by switching off the internal 5V ventilation fan by using the companion product to the GrovePowerSave, the GrovePowerDrive, a switchable buffered Output driver for Grove devices).

To Use the GrovePowerSave Board

1) You plug the incoming Grove Cable into the “In” Grove Connector on the GrovePowerSave (from the Pi2Grover for example).

2) You plug a Grove Cable into the “Out” Grove Connector on the GrovePowerSave to the Grove Device you want to control the power for (the Air Quality Sensor for example).

3) You plug a Grove Cable fromt he “Control” Grove Connector to a GPIO pin on the Raspberry Pi or Arduino (D4 in our example software).

Now you can control your device.  The GrovePowerSave powers up in an “On” condition until you have set up your GPIO pins.

 

Downloads

• Raspberry Pi Drivers for GrovePowerSave

Application Example

Example Python Software

#
#
# SDL_Pi_GrovePowerSave example
# Raspberry Pi Driver for the SwitchDoc Labs GrovePowerSave
#
# SwitchDoc Labs
# April  2017
#
# Version 1.1

# assumes device is plugged into GPIO Pin 26 (D26 of Pi2Grover board)

import  SDL_Pi_GrovePowerSave
import time

GPIO_Pin_PowerSave = 4

myPowerSave = SDL_Pi_GrovePowerSave.SDL_Pi_GrovePowerSave(GPIO_Pin_PowerSave, True)

print "turning Pin %i off" % GPIO_Pin_PowerSave
myPowerSave.turnOffPowerSave()

time.sleep(60)

myPowerSave.turnOnPowerSave()

print "turning Pin %i on" % GPIO_Pin_PowerSave