People build their projects, then want to battery power them. Their solution is to use a large battery (e.g. a 12V lead acid), connected to the Arduino external power input. The battery lasts mere days, and they become frustrated and move on to processors perceived as low power, like the MSP430 and ARM Cortex M0 series.

What if I said you could run a ATmega328P, RF transceiver and sensors from AA batteries for months at a time? A lot of people just won’t believe it, thinking the ATmega328P is a dated, power hungry chip that needs an ugly wall wart for power.

So why are people struggling with battery power?

1. The standard Arduino board accepts an external power input of between 7-12V, which then passes through a delightfully named NCP1117ST50T3G low dropout linear regulator to get it down to 5V for the rest of the board. If you are using a 12V battery via this regulator, and drawing a measly 50mA, you end up burning 0.35W of power in the regulator and the Arduino only using 0.25W! That linear regulator is an evil thing.

2. Most Arduino boards run at 5V. The ATmega328P runs fine at 3.3V and even down to 1.8V. At 3.3V, the chip uses ~40% of the power, and at 1.8V, it uses ~10%. Massive gains! 1.8V can make interfacing to other systems a bit awkward, but 3.3V is generally fine.

3. Most Arduino boards run at 16MHz by default, but a lot of the time you don’t need to run that quickly. By dropping to use the 1MHz internal oscillator, you reduce the power consumption 8 times. If you go further, you can use 128kHz oscillator and the power consumption drops 70 times!

4. A lot of Arduino code uses delays() and never sleeps. The ATmega328P has a sleep mode which can easily use less than 10µA – if you use an external 32.768kHz watch crystal, you can get this down to fractions of a µA. Learn about these and use them.

Where do you find out all of this info? It’s at the end of the ATmega328P datasheet.

You can workaround all of these – I thoroughly recommend reading JC Wippler’s posts on Jeelabs in his quest to reduce power consumption on Arduino-like board.

For the second post about Arduino misconceptions, there is the a common idea circulating that the Arduino is “slow”. Most frequently I hear this in the context of reacting to user input, dealing with multiple sensors, using LED or LCD displays, or acting as part of a control loop. People advise faster microcontrollers such as the ARM Cortex series.

Let’s look at the fundamentals here:

• The ATmega328P on the Arduino boards runs at 16MHz – that’s 16 million cycles per second.
• The ATmega328P instructions take between 1 and 3 clock cycles (with the exception of the subroutine related instructions which take 4 or 5). The average is somewhere between 1 and 2 for most compiled C code.
• We can then infer than the ATmega328P can carry out at least 8 million instructions per second!
• It’s hard to directly translate these instructions to lines of C code. What looks simple in C can take tens of instructions, and what looks complex can be done in one. 
• We can still say that the ATmega328P is going to tear through your code at a rate of knots, far faster than most people imagine.

So why do people say it is slow? I’d say the following reasons:

• It is 16MHz, and most people’s PCs and phones operate in the 1GHz range, so it doesn’t sound like much. The ATmega328P is performing entirely different tasks though.
• It is 8bit, and most modern processors are 32 or 64 bit. This doesn’t have many implications for projects using the Arduino though (but will be related to my next misconception!)
• The frequent use of delay() in Arduino code. Delay() causes the processor to just churn – it can’t do anything else whilst it is running. So if you have 4 buttons which are meant to turn on 4 respective LEDs for 2s, the system becomes unresponsive if you use delay() for the 2s.
• The frequent use of Serial.print() in most code for debugging or status reports. Arduino pre-1.0 uses to block when sending data out using the serial port. That meant an 80 character string output at 9600bps (the default, for some reason), would take over 80ms, during which time the processor could do nothing else! Even now that it uses interrupts, strings still take a long time to output.
• Slow digitalRead and digitalWrite – these two functions are orders of magnitude (~60 cycles) slower than direct port access (~1 cycle!). Heavy I/O can look slow or latent as a result.
• Bad code – the Arduino is exceptionally easy to use without understanding any of the underlying concepts of microcontrollers. As a result, code is sometimes simply bad.

A faster microncontroller can mask some of these issues, but without understanding some key concepts (interrupt handling and well structured state machines), you are going to be up against the same wall again in no time.

That’s not to say that faster microcontrollers aren’t needed sometimes – anything with heavy number crunching needs something more – but for a lot of situations an Arduino is more than capable in the hands of a good developer.

One of the first things you need to learn when interfacing switches to microcontrollers is the use of pull-up resistors. These ensure that the inputs to the microcontroller settle in either logic high or low when the switch is not made. They are fundamental, so fundamental that Atmel decided to build-in weak pull-up resistors into the ATmega328P used in the Arduino!

Simple pull-up resistor

Yet a lot of tutorials show external pull-up resistors being used with switches. There’s not really a problem with this – just that it is not required 99% of the time. It might be good to teach the concept, but I regularly see posts on forums where people have connected pull-ups incorrectly, causing them problems. I’ve even seen people confident enough to design a PCB, but have multiple external pull-ups for interfacing to a keypad!

So how do you use the internal pull-ups? It is very simple – when the data direction register is set to input, write a high to the output port:

pinMode(pin, INPUT);
digitalWrite(pin, HIGH);

Or, if you have moved away from the Arduino libraries:

DDRx &= ~(1 << pin);
PORTx |= (1 << pin);

What’s the other 1% where these internal pull-ups won’t do? There are two situations:

1. The switch requires a pull-down rather than pull-up – though this can generally be avoided
2. You need a strong rather than weak pull-up – sometimes devices draw power from the pull-up, and the 20kOhm internal pull-up is too large.

So, simplify  your circuits and remember this feature!