AYUCR
Technical Articles
Power Consumption
If you have tried to power the AYUCR Camera Controller with a 12V lighter battery you may have found the circuit drains the batter relatively quickly. The typical 12V lighter battery has a capacity of 30-33mAh. A typical 9V battery has almost 20 times more capacity. It is fairly easy to run these small batteries down if you're not careful.
The original 8pin and 18pin Camera Controller kits used some components that drew more power than necessary. In addition the timer firmware itself didn't do all it could to conserve power. These problems have been corrected for kits based on V1.53 of the firmware and later.
| Design | Average Current | Peak Current |
|---|---|---|
| Original | 12ma | 25ma |
| New | 8ma | 15ma |
You can realize some of these saving with existing kits by doing the following:
- Upgrade to V1.53 of the timer firmware.
- Replace the 150 Ohm current limiting resistor for the LED with a 330 Ohm or 470 Ohm resistor. This sacrifices some brightness but the LED should still be plenty bright
- Replace the relay with a solid state type and use a 1K Ohm current limiting resistor.