Four ways to let your Arduino work for a long time

Generally speaking, an Arduino does not consume so much power. However, if you want to start something which needs to run with battery, the power consumption is the most important problem. It is not easy to calculate the amount of time an Arduino will continue because there lots of types.

Before we tell you the ways to make Arduino conserve power, I will discuss some easy but more direct methods. The first one would be to use a suitable Arduino. The 3.3 volt Arduino will use less energy than a 5 V Arduino for a certain kind of application. The Arduino Nano and Arduino Micro will use less energy than the Uno and Mega, and if they work for your needs this will be better.


The second way is to use a suitable battery. When it comes to battery, most people think that lithium-ion batteries are the best for anything. Lithium-ion batteries are great for possessing a very high power. It is true when you work on some arduino projects like robots. However, a lead acid battery which is similar to the one in your car or truck will be a better choice if the battery doesn’t need move.

You can also ignore everything except the processor chip to save the power. In fact, do this by avoiding the power connector but providing energy to the processor with power you must be cautious here that you stay inside the operating limitations of the given chip.

The forth way to reduce power consumption is to lower the clock speed. If you don’t need the Arduino work at its maximum clock speed, it can be accomplished with the pre-scaler library. You can reduce the clock speed as much as 256, this will decrease a sixteen Megahertz Arduino to a 62.5 kHz one, but when you find yourself just checking a measurement every 25 seconds or so, which is more than enough, and this will decrease consumption significantly.