Programming sensor networks is a very different experience from programming modern systems: low memory, restricted computational and communications capabilities, poor development and debugging environments, and highly restricted battery power. It’s the latter that’s a real killer, especially when deploying into the wild: how do we keep the power consumption down? I did a summer project to explore these ideas, and SleepySketch was one of the main results. (There’s more of a justification in this post.)

The Arduino is a hobbyist hardware platform that’s peculiarly attractive for sensor systems, as it’s so cheap and surrounded by an ecosystem of extension modules (“shields”) that simplify development — especially for those of us whose electronics skills leave something to be desired. As a hobby device, though, the Arduino software platform (“sketches”) is designed for simplicity, not for longevity in sensing applications. So I wrote a harness to help keep the power down.

SleepySketch is a framework within which to deploy Arduino applications. Its main goal is to keep the microcontroller asleep for as much of the time as possible, waking up to run tasks and then going into low-power mode. This lets the programmer supply the things that should happen, and leave SleepySketch to manage the (hopefully extensive) down time.

Github repo