Possible enhancement - power saving? about esp8266-wifi-power-meter HOT 3 CLOSED

Added a power saving mode with the most recent release. The consumption of the Wifi Power Meter was reduced from 95mA to about 35mA (20mA ESP8266, 15mA TCRT5000). I had to take a few turns to deal with the unexpected change in ADC readings if ESP8266's WiFi is switched off. I'd be happy if you could give it a try.

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I have done some tests lately. When Wifi is off, the ESP8266 power consumption drops from 78mA to about 24mA. Reducing the CPU speed from 160MHz to 80MHz helps to get close to 19mA. This is more or less consistent with what I have read in various articles on the internet. But I guess that's still quite a lot to run the Wifi power meter on a (single) 18650 cell. Using a 3000mAh cell would probably provide enough power for about 5-6 days. The only way to noticeably reduce power consumption (< 1 mA) is to use deep sleep mode, which is surely not practical for this application.

What do you think, are 19mA worth the effort to introduce a (simple) "power save mode"? Switching on Wifi, publishing data und turning off Wifi takes barely one second. Of course, the latter would also make the web interface inaccessible, since the ESP8266 only wakes up to transmit the data via MQTT. However, the power save mode could be turned off with a MQTT command topic.

To keep things simple I'd rather not implement a data backlog with timestamps...

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What do you think, are 19mA worth the effort to introduce a (simple) "power save mode"? Switching on Wifi, publishing data und turning off Wifi takes barely one second. Of course, the latter would also make the web interface inaccessible, since the ESP8266 only wakes up to transmit the data via MQTT.

Your test results for power consumption with and without WiFi align with what I've seen as well. A saving of three-quarters may be attractive for users who may want to use battery power.

However, the power save mode could be turned off with a MQTT command topic.

Another possibility is that the power saving mode could be disabled using a GPIO pin. The user could install a jumper on the ESP board, or use an external switch or relay any time they want to have the WiFi activated on demand. That would allow the web interface to remain open if the user wants to log in to view metering data or make setting changes.

To keep things simple I'd rather not implement a data backlog with timestamps...

Understood. I can see that is probably more work than it's worth in this scenario.

Having said all that, unfortunately my electricity provider has since advised me that my Ferraris meters are soon to be replaced with new smart meters which only provide pulsing LED outputs. I'm happy to do some testing for you if you feel modifying the code is something you'd like to pursue, but I fear opportunities for me to do so will soon dry up.

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