Following the successful start of the ANAVI Gas Detector crowdfunding campaign, a lot of people asked me, "what is the power consumption and can it run on batteries?". Instead of just giving you the technical specifications from a datasheet I prefer to share a short video with a couple of experiments.

The operating voltage of ANAVI Gas Detector is 5 V and it is powered from a micro-USB connector. This means that any power supply for a modern phone with USB to micro-USB cable is suitable to power the board. Furthermore, this allows running ANAVI Gas Detector on batteries from a power bank.

In the first part of the video I am using a nice little USB gadget with a couple of 7-segment red displays to monitor the voltage and the current. The display on the top shows the voltage, and the other one shows the current. As you can see, the ANAVI Gas Detector with all sensors and mini OLED display consumes about 0.25A. Without the display and the I2C sensor modules, the power consumption will be less.

Although ANAVI Gas Detector has been designed for indoor usage with continuous power supply, you can actually run it on batteries too. Due to the huge popularity of smartphones and tablets, nowadays power banks with USB ports are a commodity. In the second part of the video I am running ANAVI Gas Detector powered from a USB power bank with 5V/2.1A output. The default firmware for ANAVI Gas Detector, available at GitHub, is not optimized for low-power consumption and there is room for improvement if it is needed for your project. Depending on the capacity of the power bank, ANAVI Gas Detector may run for a few days.

In the next update I will share with you a step-by-step video tutorial for flashing Arduino sketches on ANAVI Gas Detector. Thank you very much for bringing this entirely open source project to life! Stay tuned for more news and order ANAVI Gas Detector now to be among the first owners!

Thanks,
Leon