Exploring the current consumption of an Intel Edison module for IoT applications

Dam Minh Tung, Nguyen Van Toan, Jeong-Gun Lee

Abstract: Current consumption is a crucial factor for the lifetime of Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile computing devices because most of them survive on a battery or on a power harvested from their environment. In this paper, we explore the current consumption of an “Intel Edison” module which is launched for targeting IoT applications while considering its three different operation modes such as sleep, idle and active states. In addition, we measure the current consumption of a Bluetooth that is integrated on the Edison module for device connectivity. We evaluate two different Bluetooth profiles: a Personal Area Networking (PAN) profile and a Serial Port Profile (SPP). Particularly, a low power “sniff ” mode of the Bluetooth is investigated to identify the minimal current consumption of the Bluetooth enabled Edison module. The experimental results show that the Intel Edison consumes the lowest current consumption of “1.856 mA” when it is in the sleep state without activating WiFi and Bluetooth modules. In the case of using the Bluetooth sniff mode, its current drawn is slightly increased to “2.3 mA”. The results show that the Intel Edison is one of best candidate for the IoT applications requiring minimal standby power consumption while providing high computing power from its 500MHz dualcore processor.