Rong, 

How did you measure these numbers? There are a number of things that
will affect the measurements:

- input voltage and boost converter.  Boost converter essentially
eliminates the ability to operate in sub-100 uA regime; for the
measurements in the WSNA paper we did turn it off (we added a diode
bypass).  Likewise, different input voltages will operate at different
efficiencies of the converter.  Conversely, if you are bypassing the
boost converter altogether (the mote will operate from 2.7 to 3.3V) will
change the numbers quite a bit.
- software -- in some versions of TinyOS, there was an IO pin conflict
that resulted in motes drawing excess power.  It has been fixed a number
of times, but unfortunately it keeps reappearing.  In general, the
configuration of IO pins will have a large impact on the power
consumption. 
- HW configuration -- I doubt that this would have affected you, but it
is possible.  Mica with Atmega128 can be configured to run with an
internal RC oscillator at frequencies up to 8MHz.  At these frequencies,
the idle and active power consumed by the processor would be
significantly larger than those published in WSNA.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.  I would be curious to
see what caused these discrepancies. 

Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rong
Zheng
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 9:08 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Tinyos-users] Discrepancy in power consumption numbers

hi,

I recently did some measurements of the power consumption of Mica 128 
motes. Here are the numbers I got, (all the numbers the power 
consumption of the entire system in particular state listed below)

lower power (snooze) 0.97mA
idle (with radio disabled)  4.97mA
idle (with radio enabled) 11.30mA
Tx (send raw RF through SpiByte) 12.90mA
Rx 7.78mA

The numbers are different from the ones I found from the ones given in 
WSNA'02 paper. In particular to receive an AM packet consumes roughly as

much energy as transmitting an AM packet (see the attached eps files). I

wonder if there is anything wrong with my measurement methodology. In my

experiments, I removed all unnessary components.

Thanks!

Rong

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