Hi all. I’m working on a project that will run a BBB remotely from a solar panel. However, the BBB consumes quite a bit of power even when it’s doing nothing. I’ve looked high and low for a solution to put the BBB into a sleep state of some sort either triggered by hardware of software but I have yet to find a working solution.
Is anyone aware of something that works? I’ve been looking through the AM335x’s spec sheets and it does seem to support suspend states, but I’ll be darned if I know how to implement that support in Linux.
Any advice is appreciated!
Newer kernels have better sleep modes. Check out the 3.14 kernel.
Why do you need all that overhead for a remote solar-powered device? More info on what you’re trying to do might yield better solutions…
@Clark_Leach , I need to be able to process video, manipulate images and upload results to an ftp site. I’ve trialed several devices and the BBB seems to be the best fit.
I see. So you probably do need the processing power. I’ve had a BBB for weeks now and barely had a chance to power it up; too many irons in the fire. As far as putting the micro to sleep goes, that shouldn’t be too hard (from a C/Assembler point of view); how to make it happen way up in Linuxland is beyond me at this point. I bet you won’t have to look too far to find a solution.
To suspend, use pm-suspend if available. You can also use dbus if you need your applications to prepare for it. Otherwise echo mem >/sys/power/state will force the operation.