Battery powered

My latest project is to make something battery powered, based on an ESP32 processor. The ESP32 data sheet claims it can go down to under 1uA in a deep sleep mode. It also has an Ultra Low Power processor that can do things in deep sleep at only a few uA. It is not very clear in the datasheet for the ESP32-WROOM-32 module how low it can go - after all that has extra bits including an external flash. So it was a bit of an unknown. However, I have made something, and it works... (on GitHub)

The first board was a cock up - wrong footprint completely on a key device - kicking myself. The second version was more what I would expect - some minor errors I could work around, allowing me to prove it all works and confirm power usage. The 3rd version was great except one of the chips again had wrong footprint - but this time close enough for the device to fit without problem. I have managed to keep the device tiny - not much bigger than the ESP32-WROOM-32 itself.

The first application is actually to work with a VL53L0X ranger in the top of an oil tank, running on battery and reporting over WiFi. The next trick may be LoRa for such things.

Battery / power supply?

The first real question was whether to try and run directly from a battery, or to use a power supply?

Directly from a battery means finding a battery that is within spec to produce 3.3V. The voltage from a battery is often slightly more (when new) than stated, and depends on the battery technology. The processor will cope with voltages a bit out of range as well (3.0V to 3.6V). So a 3V battery should work. But the voltage drops as the battery runs down, and we are starting on the edge of acceptable voltages, so this could cause problems. The advantage of running directly from a battery, apart from fewer components, is the really low power modes of the ESP32 should allow a really long battery life.

With a power supply you have the advantage of using a wide range of battery, e.g. 4.5V, 9V, 12V, etc, but the big disadvantage of wasting power on the regulator itself.

I ended up using the LMR16006 from TI which is designed for battery devices, and has an idle current of 28uA when not driving much load (e.g. an ESP32 in deep sleep). It also has a shutdown mode drawing less than 1uA (see more on that later).

However, testing showed that it draws 34uA when not even connected to a load. This pretty much is explained by the 460kΩ potential divide built in to the fixed 3.3V module to drive its feedback pin. I could go for external potential divide but 460kΩ is on the top range recommended in the data sheet.

However, even 34uA is good, and can allow a battery to last years.

USB as well?

Do I need USB as well? Well, no, not really, I could have a generic programming header, but I like the USB-C connectors. They are good as a power supply when not running off battery, and make programming and debug easy. So yes, I'd like to keep the USB.

The issue is power. The USB chip (FT231X) can be powered from USB, and even work its own 3.3V I/O from that. So it can be totally off when no USB. Good.

But it is used to control EN/GPIO0 to reset and put the ESP32 in boot mode. If USB is off, the ESP32 stays in reset. Thankfully the USB chip can be configured to invert RTS and DTR if you want, so I put them through a simple transistor inverter so that when the USB is off the ESP32 is not in reset or boot mode. The result then works as expected with the debug and flashing tools in the ESP IDF.

The Tx pin to the USB when powered down was a concern, but it seems to cause no problem, and the code can turn it off immediately on start up, and in deep sleep it is not connected.

The USB chip can also feed in some useful GPIO pins, reporting when it is on (a fixed "1" on a CBUS pin), and even if it is connected to a charger not a USB device. This means the software can tell if running from battery or not, and stay awake when being used for USB debug.

How low does the ESP32-WROOM-32 go?

Well, the good news is that the ESP32-WROOM-32 does indeed use bugger all (aka 1uA) in deep sleep. This is impressive, so we are looking at under 35uA idle current for the whole board from a 9V supply when idle.

Obviously we need to wake up occasionally, but we can wake up, boot, connect to WiFi, connect to MQTT, report status, and shut down in under a second with fixed IP. Indeed, the WiFi can be in use for under half a second, which is impressive. We need to do some long term tests to confirm battery life.

Measuring the voltage?

Of course, one thing we want to measure is the battery voltage. That allows us to see if we have a low battery. It is essential for any battery based device to tell you the battery is low. The answer is a simple potential divide feeding an ADC input to the ESP32. Except that draws current! Even 1MΩ divide is 9uA at 9V, 100% of the time.

The answer is a FET, well, two FETs. I am not an electrical engineer so this needed a bit of research. One FET or transistor would not work as it had to be at the "top" of the divider. If it was at the bottom of the divider it would mean 9V going in to the ADC pin when the FET was off. But when at the top of the divider you don't have GND as a reference to drive the FET.

The answer is an N-channel FET driving a P-channel FET, all in one package. Thanks to twitter for help on this. It works! I can turn on the divider, take a reading, and turn off again. I have some resistors to ensure than when GPIOs are isolated the FET stays off anyway. Sorted.

How low can you go?

Can I do better than 35uA? Well, yes, probably. The ESP32-WROOM-32 itself goes down to 1uA or so. The regulator in shutdown goes to 1uA but as that annoying potential divider still. If I was able to shutdown and disconnect the power from the ESP32-WROOM-32, it could run off a capacitor for many seconds at 1uA.

So basically I'd need a way for the processor to turn off its own power most of the time!

The trick is ensuring that if you sleep too long, the power will come back on anyway, and indeed when first powered up.

I think I can do this with another FET, pulling the shutdown pin to GND, driven from a GPIO pin. When no power the GPIO will go to ground, pulled by parasitic diodes if nothing else, and cause the FET to go off. Of course you still have the issue of making the shutdown pin then go high when the FET is off, with the only power being the battery, so you still need that one pull up resistor. I wonder how big we can make it? If we can make it 10MΩ we waste only 1uA on that.

The same signal driving the shutdown pin could also drive a FET switching the feedback potential divider, so we turn that off too. It may need some careful design, e.g. FET at bottom of that divide, to ensure we don't fool the regulator in to supplying too much power because its feedback is not get connected, but that should not be rocket science.

For now, I'll test using the current design, idling at 35uA, and see how it goes. But I may yet make a new version that tries to turn itself off most of the time :-)

P.S. I am such a fan of solder paste now, I can't see me ordering boards without getting a stencil as well. It is so quick and so reliable, it is quite amazing really...

NFC reader works, what next

It has been a month since I came up with this crazy idea, but the NFC reader board is working really well now. To be fair, every version I have made has worked, just some better than others. The most noticeable impact on how well it works is the inductors. Using small inductors (i.e. 0603) means it is crap - needs fob flat on then antenna to do anything. Now it works around 2cm. I have changed layout a lot, changed the antenna shape, changed component size. Lots.

I have, however, learned a lot about ESD protection, layout for RF, choosing components for RF, using KiCad, and solder paste. The solder paste has perhaps been to be the biggest change as I am no longer afraid of adding passives, which previously would have been far too annoying to hand solder and take too much space. Lots of 0603s are no issue now.

So I have a nice NFC card design, thanks a lot to John for his help. I also have a nice door control module which is tiny, and only 7mm thick. Easy to fit in a back box with other stuff.

If any hack space want to have a play with one of these NFC boards, let me know. I'd be interested in feedback. Main advantages over Elechouse are red/amber/green LEDs, tamper button, door bell input, and more ESD protection.

The boards, and 3D cases, are all on GitHub.

So what next?

Well - battery power - that's what. I have made up a new regulator for my boards rather than using the Pololu boards (they really are very good!). It has an automatic ECO mode dropping to 27uA.

Planning to work on Ultra Low Power mode on the ESP32, see how low I can get it, and run from a battery.

So now I need a board that can be low power. This means the USB chip needs to be turned off when not using USB, which is fun as it means I do not want to power its I/O pins for Tx either - and the ESP32 blurts lots of debug on Tx at start up. So a small FET is in order. Also quite fun as the FT231X USB chip works the RST and GPIO0 pins, so need them to work properly when no USB power.

P.S. Why USB?

Someone asked why do I have USB at all? I used to have boards with USB-C for power, and a header for programming, but it was actually less space and easier to just fit an FT231 to the board instead of the header, so using the USB for power and serial load/debug. The battery board is perhaps an exception as it needs a couple of extra components to let me disconnect the USB, but even so, on a board this small an extra programming header would be tricky, so I decided to stick with USB serial.

Solder paste stencil

My soldering is not bad, but there are limits, and I am reaching them with the smaller and smaller components I am trying to use. Not only are the pins small, they are under the chip. A small QFN is just about doable. So I wanted to up my skills in soldering and try solder paste. I'm impressed with the result, but it was a bit of a journey.

How to do it? Get an oven, get a proper solder stencil, and get the right solder paste. You can then wipe the paste through the stencil with a plastic card, apply components and cook. It works!

So what was so hard?

Well, it was not as simple as it sounds, so here is what happened.

Laser a stencil?

I decided to try and make a stencil myself. Basically, having a proper metal stencil made adds another £50 to the cost, and someone said they had success with a vinyl cutter. I decided to try a laser. I got a cheap one off Amazon (K4 laser generic Chinese thing). Sadly the firmware simply will not laser cut, it only raster images. It looks like I could dismantle it and re-flash with something sane, but a lot of work.

Try again

So I ordered a better laser, one that actually claims to do GRBL. Again from Amazon. The GRBL firmware loader is a windows program but works from parallels, and then it just works nicely with LaserWeb on my Mac. I'm amazed at what you can get.

So what to cut to make a stencil? Well I tried mylar and it sort of melted. I tried acetate, and it sort of burned!

So I tried some actual vinyl, and that worked surprisingly well, but is just not quite accurate enough - rough edges. It would be fine for 0603 but not QFNs. Bugger.

Oh, and all of them made some nasty smells - this is why a cheap laser is not ideal - no fans. Recommend using outside!

Cut a stencil?

Next I tried an actual vinyl cutter, as someone else had managed this. How hard could it be. I decided to try and do a bit more research, and there are some nice small cutters like Cricut and Silhouette. However I see Cricut recently stopped you cutting your own designs!!! You have to pay for designs. Wow. And I could not work out what you needed for Silhouette to work. So I went for a more generic cutter/plotter that does HPGL. Using Inkcut on my Mac worked, I can cut things...

But, not quite. For a start it took a bit to work out it uses XON/XOFF. Then I found when the serial port closes at the end of the job the printer aborts and so does not finish the job (I added a delay to fix that).

It could not cope with mylar or acetate, but did cut vinyl. However, it did not make a clean stencil! The pads were not closed and the fine pads were just a diagonal line!

The answer is that I did not quite do enough research. This is a "drag blade" cutter, so the blade point drags 0.25mm behind. This would be fine(ish) for cutting large sticky back lettering, but now when the features you are cutting are not even 0.25mm wide! There are, apparently, some s/w work arounds I could try. But for now I have given up and decided to do it properly...

Try again

Update: It looks like the Silhouette printers are going to work. Seems you have to pay £50 more for being able to load an SVG, but it will load a DXF anyway. Converting SVG to DXF is easy with inkscape and free, so why would you pay £50 more. That said, I am not sure it can cope with such detail.

Use a proper stencil?

So I ordered a proper stencil - very nice. PCB Train do a good job.

I ordered some solder paste from RS, and, well, it was a disaster. It was runny and far too much solder paste, and well, useless!

Try again

I was desparing, but encouraged by people on twitter who clearly managed to do this right, I carried on. I ordered some different solder paste, just in case.

It worked first time, clean, nice, easy to use. I am impressed.

The first board made like this actually worked - well minor issue with reset, but did then work. So now to try another.

Update:

I failed to get anything to make my own stencils, but the ones from PCB Train are impressive. One trick is they charge the same for stencils up to a certain size, so I'll be adding a number of boards that I think I have finished and ready to the artwork for next stencil order anyway. If they are the same when I order the actual boards, great,  I have a stencil already. If not, then it has not cost me to do this, but it is an incentive not to move any components if I do have further changes at all before ordering.