[Amforth-devel] Ultra Low Power operation

[pito <pi...@vo...>]

Hi, as the amforth will not be a subject of power computing let me
ask the experts following:
1. would it be possible to create a mechanism where amforth/atmega
will be run on _very_ low power - basically powerdown or sleep
2. the rx will be connected to an additional interrupt pin (e.g.
wired-or from various sources) and when a character comes (startbit
does log1->log0) it will fire interrupt and wake up the chip (first
character will be lost probably as the chip needs some time to
wakeup)
3. after receiving a character it will issue some message on state -
that everything is ok (e.g. none reset or power-off occured) and it
will start to communicate with us in a normal way..
4. when not communicating with host for e.g. 10sec, or none tasks to
accomplish, it will go to low power state again..

The idea behind is to power a gadget from a 3V coin battery, or a
nimh AAA cell (and to use e.g. max1724 upconverter to 3v3 or 5v)
maybe charged from a sollar cell.

So the challenge is to achieve an ultra low power operation, without
loosing RAM and i/o information, but be ready to ad-hoc communicate
with a host via the serial anytime. I think this needs a support
from amforth "OS" side as well. P.