USB Power Bank’s Auto-Off Becomes Useful Feature In Garage Door Remote

July 6, 2021 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

For devices that are destined for momentary and infrequent use as well as battery power, some kind of power saving is pretty much a required feature. For example, when [PJ Allen] turned two ESP8266-based NodeMCU development boards into a replacement wireless remote garage door opener, a handy USB power bank ended up serving as a bit of a cheat when migrating the remote away from the workbench. Instead of moving the board from USB to battery power and implementing some kind of sleep mode or auto-off, [PJ Allen] simply plugged in a USB power bank and let it do all the work.

This is how the feature works: some USB power banks turn themselves off unless they detect a meaningful current draw. That means that if the power bank is charging a phone, it stays on, but if it’s only lighting up a few LEDs, it’ll turn itself off. This feature can be a frustrating one, but [PJ Allen] realized that it could actually be useful for a device like his garage door remote. Turning on the power bank delivers 5 V to the NodeMCU board and allows it to work, but after about fifteen seconds, the power bank turns itself off. Sure, strapping a power bank to the remote makes the whole thing bigger than it needs to be, but it’s a pretty clever use of the minimum load as an effortless auto-off feature.

The NodeMCU boards in [PJ Allen]’s DIY remote use ESP-NOW for their wireless communications, a nifty connectionless protocol from Espressif that we’ve seen used in other projects as well, such as this ESP32-based walkie-talkie.

Brilliant Auto-off Feature For A Bike Light

February 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

auto-off-bike-light-switch

If you’re going to use your bicycle as transportation at night you really must have a head and tail light in hopes that the crazy drivers don’t hit you. For good reason, these lights don’t turn themselves off. But [Miceuz] kept forgetting to shut it down upon arrival and always ended up with dead batteries. His quest for an auto-off feature that actually worked ended in a brilliant and simple add-on circuit.

He first thought about using an accelerometer, but couldn’t find one that fit the bill without also adding a microcontroller. He came up with an even simpler circuit, which can be seen at the base of the black plastic housing. It’s a bit of copper clad board with a small spring attached. The spring completes an RC timer circuit which drives a MOSFET. When that circuit is charged, the MOSFET connects power to the bike light. When the cap runs out the MOSFET threshold cuts power and everything turns off. Since the spring jiggles while he rides it provides the momentary connection necessary to charge the capacitor. Stay stationary for about 30 seconds and the auto-off kicks in.

Adding Auto-off To A Cheap Multimeter

July 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Florin] picked up a cheap multimeter in order to make multiple measurements at one time. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at remembering to turn it off when he was finished so he burned through some batteries. Why an auto-off feature wasn’t the first thing coded into the firmware we’ll never know, but [Florin] developed his own hardware-based auto-off circuit.

It sounds like he had all of the components necessary for this on hand already. He grabbed an AVR ATtiny25 in a surface mount package. To keep the board small, he didn’t include an ISP header, but instead made long pads that could have wires soldered to them for flashing the firmware. The microcontroller drives an NPN transistor that can cut off the ground path between the multimeter and its battery. A tactile switch is connected to one of the external interrupt pins and, when pressed, gives you 15 minutes of time to use the meter. After that, the chip kills the power and goes into sleep mode. Simple, and small enough to fit inside the case.

[via Dangerous Prototypes]