Hookup Guide
SchematicProduct Overview
Our RedBoards are great. But don't they sometimes seem a little BIG?!
Enter smôl, a new range of boards which are both small in size and small on current draw. It's a smôl world!
The smôl Power Board AAA is an intelligent power board for the smôl ecosystem. Designed to boost the voltage from one or two AAA or AA cells up to 3.3V, you would expect this board to have a TPS61200 regulator on it, and indeed it does. (That's the same regulator we use on our LiPower - Boost Converter.) But you probably wouldn't expect it to have an AVR ATtiny43 microcontroller on it. So why have we included one?
This is an intelligent power board for smôl. The power board takes control of the 3.3V power for the whole smôl stack. The processor board can then instruct the power board to put the entire smôl stack into deep sleep for a pre-defined interval. Sleep intervals of 10's of milliseconds to several days are possible. In deep sleep, the only device left powered is the ATtiny43 and that reduces the current draw to 12µA. Yes, you read that right, 12 microamps! smôl makes it possible for your battery life to be measured in months not days! We used the fantastic Otii Arc Power Analyzer to help us reduce the sleep current as much as possible.
Our smôl Power Board Arduino Library has examples to get you started.
