Low Power and Raspberry Pi vs Arduino
Raspberry Pi as singleboard microcomputer is not a suitable representative of a device with low-power consumption. Raspberry Pi is primarily a microcomputer running an operating system that handles parallel tasks. Although it has significantly lower consumption than standard PCs, it does not contain ACPI or any power management. It can only be turned off.
The main energy consumer is the CPU. If it is idle, it consumes less. Reduce system load is possible by shutting down unnecessary services and processes that run after startup. The general rule to follow when using Raspberry Pi as an IoT device is to use the cleanest system (with the least number of preinstalled software and running services).
So if we want to reduce energy consumption on Raspberry Pi, we have to do it differently. In general, two options can be considered:
- minimize the number of connected external devices that take energy, to the minimum, and
- reduce system load
Still, Raspberry Pi is a very popular device for designing IoT solutions for many of its features. But it is not the ideal representative of low-power devices. Therefore, in the next two chapters, examples and possibilities of reducing the energy consumption of IoT devices will be presented on the Arduino Uno prototype board and especially on its ATmega328P microcontroller.