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Recommendations for low power Windows Labview controller


@AeroSoul wrote:

Raspberry Pi (some version of 2 and 3) have a 1W-1.5W idling power consumption


But don't try on a Raspberry Pi 4. You can bake eggs on them! 🥚😂

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
Message 11 of 14
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Thanks for all the great suggestions!


Yesterday, I am just wondering whether any NI product (industry-proven) can serve "power saving" capability. The whole system will only be activated once a sensor was triggered to wake this up. After certain duration of measurement, the system will return "sleep" mode. 


I am also using Arduino Pro Mini for some low-power projects. For project related to low-power data logging from sensors, Arduino is a better candidate over Raspberry Pi (this small computer eats up more energy and heated up easily). 


After some searching on NI stuffs, I realized that only cRIO system can provide "sleep" mode. This means, we need to feed up continuous power supply to the whole line of monitoring system day & night (for long-term project). Doing this can be alright in laboratory/ factory production line, but it sounds to be tricky for field (rugged) monitoring scheme.

 

Above are what I have understood thus far and welcome further comments/ suggestions. Thanks. 

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Message 12 of 14
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@EurekaJX wrote:


After some searching on NI stuffs, I realized that only cRIO system can provide "sleep" mode. This means, we need to feed up continuous power supply to the whole line of monitoring system day & night (for long-term project). Doing this can be alright in laboratory/ factory production line, but it sounds to be tricky for field (rugged) monitoring scheme.


If you refer to this, that is only for the IO modules such as the C modules plugged into the controller. The main controller is unaffected from this. I have worked with an sbRIO-9651 in a custom board design and while our board also contains eight 8- channel ADCs and some other peripheral it consumes typically 0.21-0.25 A at 24V power supply.

 

So our entire module consumes about 6W with about 1.5W for the ADCs and 0.5W for other functionality on the board. This makes the sbRIO-9651 SOM module use around 4W of power typically. Please note that this is typical power consumption, the SOM module is rated for 7W power consumption for itself plus 2.7W for powering the 3 IO banks, which I doubt it will ever reach but still.

 

This is the smallest of the NI RIO offerings. There are not likely any RIO controllers that go below this rating at all. Even the very old PowerPC based controllers such as the cRIO-9012 were specified to use 6W for the controller part alone, which used a 400 MHz PPC. The sbRIO-9651 uses a 667 MHz Zync-7000 FPGA with integrated ARM CPU and that is likely the most power savy variant in the NI program currently. Unfortunately the specifications in the NI data sheets are not very detailed.

 

The 906x controllers, which are based on the same Zync-7000 chip, only specify a maximum power rating of 14W without any C modules populated, and 18W with 4 modules populated, but no idle (standby) power consumption.

 

The 903x and 904x, which use Intel Atom Dual Core CPUs and different clock rates between 1.3 and 1.9 GHz, state only a variable maximum power with all C modules populated, which is understandable as there are variations in the number of slots  and a uniform standby power consumption of 3.4W for all of them, which I'm not quite sure how they measured that. Considering that they use quite different CPU speeds I guess the standby in the specifications means really standby, with the CPU somehow put in sleep mode, but not quite sure how they do that. And according to your description 3.4W standby (sleep) power consumption would be anyhow to much.

 

This document describes an additional power saving mode by shutting down the OS. This is likely how the standby measurement above was achieved. Only way to wake it up from that seems to be if your controller supports a serial port with a RI (Ring Indicator) input or a manual power cycle.

Rolf Kalbermatter
My Blog
Message 13 of 14
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Hi Rolf Kalbermatter, 

 

Thanks for your detail description on the NI system that u r using... especially on the power consumption aspect of the device. 

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Message 14 of 14
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