Disabling USB/Ethernet on Raspberry Pi3

[HARRY99]

Hi,

In order to save power consumption I would like to disable USB/Internet on my new Raspberry PI 3. Searching internet I found various suggestions, but none of these work an my PI 3 with Debian. Does somebody have a solution?
Thanks in advance.
Regards,

Harry

[tomazzi]

In order to save power consumption I would like to disable USB/Internet on my new Raspberry PI 3. Searching internet I found various suggestions, but none of these work an my PI 3 with Debian. Does somebody have a solution?

Since all the network cards are switched into a power-save state by default and automatically, I can't see what's Your problem...

The only (quick) solution which is coming to my mind is to change the beacon interval for Your (open source and fully featured, DD/Open-WRT router)

(If Your Wi-Fi router is not Open/DD-WRT compiliant, throw it into a trashcan, and buy the working one - this will save Your life - seriously )

[andre@home]

Tried this one?
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_re ... _Controler
Other hardware is also discussed there.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Searching internet I found various suggestions, but none of these work an my PI 3 with Debian. Does somebody have a solution?

You need to post everything you have tried to prevent duplication of effort by those who attempt to assist you.

Have you tried blacklisting the kernel modules for the device drivers?

[tomazzi]

In order to save power consumption I would like to disable USB/Internet on my new Raspberry PI 3.

It would be nice to see some real measurements of that "savings" - namely the value of (electrical) current measured at the output of power supply unit.

Regards.

[andre@home]

Switching off the wifi of the Pi-2 of my sons experiments for his master thesis, I measured a reduction in current from 150mA before and 120mA after switching it off. So that is ~20% reduction in current and as P=V*A also in power...
We did not power down other things. The Pi (with cam) had to take photos in the forest (on battery running). After ~ 3 days batteries (rechargeable) needed to be replaced.
Wunder whether other things can also reach 20% power savings....

[tomazzi]

The methods which You have linked above are not disabling the chip, but only the radio transmitter
When there's no active connections, the radio transmitter is also off - there's simply no difference in power consumption in both cases - and that's why I quoted the word "savings".

I haven't measured RPi3, but I've checked the USB TP-Link TL-WN823N, which is based on RTL8192CU and it needs only about 2mA on Idle -> which is about 10mW.

So please, 150mW (~30mA@5V) is the power needed to transmit wi-fi radio signal at the typical level of ~20dBm

Regards.

[andre@home]

Have to ask whether wlan was on at that moment transmitting... too long ago (~1.5 yr).
Still all energy saving are still nice when you are running on a battery.... in the forest... some several small ones also do contribute.

[pylkko]

Do you mind if I ask why are you using Debian instead of Raspbian?

Have you tried this:

Code: Select all

/etc/init.d/networking stop
echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/bcm2708_usb/buspower

This guy here claims that putting down the USB-ethernet hub thing on the Pi gave him 5 hours more time on a battery, which sounds pretty impressive (he uses the term phenomenal) considering that most of the running times he cites are way under 24 hours.


https://babaawesam.com/2014/01/24/power ... pberry-pi/

But you might find more at rapberrypi forum and you might want to use the foundation kernel and OS.

[andre@home]

Or is it the ARM CPU version of Debian..... (so what you call Raspbian) and so the same???

[liudr]

What is the rate the camera is taking photos? A raspberry pi consumes a lot of power if you want to power it on a battery because there is no way it could turn itself off. If you are doing triggered photos or time elapse photos with say 10 minutes per photo, you should really turn your raspberry pi off or use an Arduino to take photos. An arduino (custom board) will be able to turn everything off including itself and wake up when a photo is needed. Trying to use a computer to do what a microcontroller should do is not a solution. Sorry.