Ultra Low Power RF uC for building sensor mesh network

[davorin]

Looking for someone to share his thoughts and experience with using one of those new low-power RF uControllers from TI like the CC1310/CC1350 to be used as an ultra low power sensor node in a mesh network...

Or are there any better RF controllers out there in the 868MHz band which can run severals years on battery?

I like the CC1350 as it has BLE on chip as well...so theoretically you could configure a sensor node with your smartphone...

[mik4el]

Testing the cc1350 currently. I come from a software background and have played with arduinos and then 8-bit AVRs so the step up to the cc1350 is big but has been manageable with the great support that exists from TI with examples and their forum. The dev environment is good with the free Code composer studio etc. The performance of the cc1350 launchpad seems to be close to the datasheet, i.e. very low power and long range. Anything in particular you are curious about?

I have a test project at https://github.com/mik4el/testing-cc1350 for anyone curious!

[Kalvin]

You just need to be able to make the MCU to enter the low-power sleepmode in which it will consume a microampere or two. Then you need to make sure that the communication will take place as fast as possible. After that it is just about how much energy you can extract from the battery and how long you would like the battery to last: Measure how much energy a typical transmission / transaction and sensor polling consumes, and determine how often the device will be able to wake up to make a transmission and device polling until the battery is exhausted.

[julianhigginson]

lots of low power RF SOCs out there at the moment.

Ti are pretty good. All I would say with them is stay away from their 8051 core models, as they have had their day... But both the ones you are interested in are ARM so all good. I haven't used either of these yet, but I'd not be afraid to.

As far as battery goes, you can definitely have lots of modern RF SOCs making a product that will live for years on a coin cell... but you need to think about your application and your data transport requirements.

If your processor needs to do lots of intensive processing or very frequent sampling of sensors and can't stay asleep 99.99% of the time, of course that will be a problem. 

Or if it has a long RF activity time (say, like transmitting LoRa with the data rate wound way down to get huge coding gains, or even something else with a  protocol where you might have to stay listening for extended periods to catch a message from something else, even just for getting the network up first time) you need to be careful with coin cells.. because with coin cells drawing over their rated current, even for a reasonably short time (20 seconds or so) you can badly derate them from their expected mAh lifetime.

[up8051]

ST has some Sub 1Ghz RF uC.
Look here:
http://www.st.com/en/wireless-connectivity/sub-1ghz-rf.html?querycriteria=productId=SC1845

Regards,
up8051