Display power consumption

Erland Lewin erland at lewin.nu
Thu Dec 27 16:18:21 CET 2007


Thomas Gstädtner wrote:
> does somebody know if it is possible to turn off the Neo's display?
> Currently only the backlight is disabled and the display still stays 
> on (what's totally useless and a waste of energy).
Does anybody have any idea how much energy just updating/driving the 
display without backlight consumes?

I would guess it is relatively little - the discussions on the wiki:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973_GTA01_Power_Management

all seem to be about the power usage of the backlight. So I would think 
that efforts to reduce power consumption might be better used elsewhere.

IMHO, the critical power consumption parameter is how much the GSM 
subsystem uses while idle, but connected to the network. This is 
apparently quite high on the GTA01 (50 mW?) making long standby times 
impossible.  Hopefully the GTA02 will use less (<10 mW) (see the 
neo1973-hardware archives for a discussion this month (December 2007). 
Anything that uses substantially less than this will have a marginal 
impact on standby time.

/Erland





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