Dear friends welcome to another video! Today we are going to learn how to put the
ESP32 chip into the Deep Sleep mode in order to conserve power and make our projects battery
friendly. There is a lot to cover so let’s get started! Hello, guys, I am Nick and welcome to educ8s.tv
a channel that is all about DIY electronics projects. In this channel, I share everything about
the projects I build to help you develop similar projects or inspire you to start making things
because it is easy, fun and creative. Subscribe to the channel now if you do not
want to miss any future video. The ESP32 chip is a fantastic new chip with
great features. It offers a lot of processing power, two 32
bit cores, a lot of memory, Bluetooth and WiFi in a small and easy to use chip. One of the most interesting things about the
ESP32 chip is that it offers a low-power deep sleep mode which is very easy to use. Let’s see how to use it. Inside the ESP32 chip, we can find the two
processing cores, the RAM and ROM memory, the WiFi module, the Bluetooth Module, a hardware
acceleration module for cryptographic applications, the RTC module, and a lot of peripherals. Inside the RTC module, we can find a PMU (Phasor
measurement unit) a small and very low power 32-bit co-processor, and 8Kbs of RAM memory. This small amount of memory is very useful
as you are going to find out in a moment. Also note, even the RTC memory of the ESP32
chip is 4 times larger than the memory of the Arduino Uno. The WiFi modules, the Processing Cores, and
the Bluetooth module require a lot of current to operate. So, if we want to conserve power we have to
disable them when don’t use them. This is what we are going to do now. We are going to put the ESP32 to Deep – Sleep
mode where it disables everything except the RTC module. There is a light sleep mode and the Deep – Sleep
mode. In Deep Sleep mode the ESP32 offers the lowest
power consumption. It just needs 0.01 mAs of current in Deep
Sleep mode and that’s why we are going to try today. In this mode as I said earlier, everything
is disabled. The CPU cores, the WiFI module, the Bluetooth
Module, the Peripherals and so on. Along with the CPU, the main memory of the
chip is also disabled, so everything stored in the memory is lost forever. The only module that still works when in deep-sleep
mode is the RTC module, the ultra-low-power co-processor, and its memory! So, if we save the data we want to survive
the Deep-Sleep mode into the RTC memory they will be intact when we wake the chip back
up. There are three ways to wake up the chip. We can use a timer, a GPIO pin, or the co-processor. Today we are going learn how to use the timer
to wake up the chip after a specific amount of time. Let’s see an example. I have connected two LEDs to this ESP32 board. When the ESP32 boots up it lights up the yellow
LED for three seconds, and then it goes into Deep-Sleep mode for 3 seconds. When it wakes up, it lights up the Green led
for 3 seconds and goes back to sleep. From now on it will only blink the green LED,
so the chip remembers that it is not the first time it boots up because we are using the
RTC memory to store an integer value. Let’s take a quick look at the code of this
project. As you can see the code is very simple. In order to put the ESP32 into Deep-Sleep
mode, all we need is two lines of code. We enable the timer with the esp_sleep_enable_timer_wakeup
function, we enter the time to sleep in seconds here, and then we call the esp_deep_sleep_start
function. That’s it! There is a small difference with the execution
of the code though. When we use the deep-sleep function, each
time the ESP32 wakes up, it executes the setup function again. The loop function is never called. All the variable values are lost, except if
we save them in the RTC memory using this prefix. In this example, I save the bootCount int
variable into the RTC memory in order the program to know if it is the first time it
runs and turn on the correct LED. As always you can find the code of this example
in the description below. Let’s now see the power consumption of the
board. When the ESP32 is in active mode, it draws
around 60mAs of current from the battery. When the ESP32 is in Deep Sleep mode it draws
around 19mAs of current! This is a big reduction in current draw, but
the creators of the chip claim that it needs 0.01mA of current in deep-sleep mode. What’s wrong with our setup? The culprit is the board. I am using a DOIT ESP32 board, the first ESP32
board that appeared on the market about a year ago. The design of the board is not optimized for
power consumption so, even in deep-sleep mode, it needs a lot of current. Luckily there are better designed ESP32 boards
out there. For example, the Firebeetle ESP32 board by
DFrobot is better designed and can achieve a deep-sleep current of just 0.01mΑs when
powered by a 3.3V power supply. If we power the board with the same battery
pack we used before, which outputs around 4.8V, we can see that the current draw is
48mAs in active mode and just 0.05mAs Deep Sleep mode! Impressive isn’t it! We can further reduce the power consumption
of the board if we use a 3.3V battery or power supply. I will try that in a future video. The 0.05mΑs of current that the board requires
in Deep-Sleep mode is the lowest current draw I have ever seen in a fully featured ESP32
board, with USB to serial driver, regulator, and battery circuit. If you have discovered any board that can
achieve similar or better results than the Firebeetle board, please let me know in the
comments section below, I would love to try it. The power consumption of the Firebeetle ESP32
board in Deep-Sleep mode is extremely low. It needs around 1.44 mΑhs per day if powered
by 4 AA rechargeable batteries. So, in theory, this power bank which has a
capacity of 2.500mAhs can power the board for almost 5 years if we put it in Deep Sleep
mode! Of course, we are going to wake up the board
from time to time to perform a task which will require more power, so the battery life
will be reduced greatly. For example, do you remember the E-Paper thermometer
we built last week? It needed 60mAs current when not updating. Now, using the deep sleep functionality of
the chip, I managed to reduce current draw to 0.43mAs of current. So, with this power bank, we now have an estimated
battery life of around 3 months. Great, isn’t it? But I think there is a lot of room for improvements;
there is a small current leak somewhere in my circuit. If we can reduce it, we can make this project
run on batteries for over a year! I think this is amazing! We now have an extremely powerful board with
very low power consumption. The best of all is that all we need to do
to take advantage of this is to use just two lines of code! I will start using this feature a lot in my
future projects. Unfortunately, the ESP32 software & hardware
is not mature yet. There is a software or hardware bug that appears
in both the ESP32 boards I tried when using the deep sleep mode. After a random number of wakes up, the ESP32
goes to sleep and it won’t wake up again. This bug can happen after a couple of wake
ups, or after 100. It is just random. One simple solution I discovered is to add
a small delay of 500ms after waking up and before reading from the RTC memory. This way the project worked fine, but of course
the penalty we pay is reduced battery life, because the chip is in active mode for 500ms
more in each wake up. I think this bug will be resolved in the near
future with a new software or hardware fix. I would love to know your opinion about the
Deep Sleep mode that the ESP32 offers. Are you going to use it in any of your projects? Please post your ideas in the comments section
below; I love reading your thoughts! If this is your first time here, I would love
to have you subscribed. In this channel, I post videos about DIY projects
twice a month. I love making things, and I believe that anyone
can make things, anyone can become a maker. That’s why I created this channel, to share
my knowledge with the community and learn from the community. I hope you will join us. I will see you in the next video! [ Translating these subtitles? Add your name here! ]
