Power Characterization of Raspberry Pi Agricultural Sensor Nodes Using Arduino Based Voltmeter

Power consumption as one of main problems in the development of efficient wireless sensor network, was assessed in this paper. The power consumption of Raspberry Pi based wireless sensor nodes was characterized at different states of operation, such as idling, sensing, processing, and transmitting. The power consumed was evaluated prior to deployment in agriculture field for environment monitoring. The shunt resistor was implied to calculate the power from the measured voltage drop using Arduino as voltmeter. The mathematical model of total power consumption was established to estimate the sensor node operational lifetime in network. The power consumption model achieved a root mean square error of 9.02 hours, which obtained an accuracy of more than 80 %.