User Manual

unexpected behavior and the EN pin will no longer. Also this doesn't provide power on BAT or USB and some

Feathers/Wings use those pins for high current usages. You may end up damaging your Feather.

Connect an external 5V power supply to the USB and GND pins. Not recommended, this may cause unexpected

behavior when plugging in the USB port because you will be back-powering the USB port, which

could

confuse

or damage your computer.

Power Usage & Saving with WiFi

WiFi is a very power-hungry protocol. During transmit and SSID association, you'll see high power usages. For

example, here is an MQTT demo running where it connects to the WPA SSID and then sents a packet every 5 seconds

or so:

You can see the chip launch at about 1.5 seconds, then turn on the WiFi and at about 2s make the SSID connection

and MQTT connection. The average current is about 100ms afterwards, and a packet spikes up to ~130mA at the 7

second mark.

100mA is still quite a bit, you can very easily reduce this by letting the WINC1500 manage its own power:

When this line is added, it lets the WINC1500 know that when nothings going on, shut down unneeded parts. You dont

have to manage the power modes, and the power will drop down nearly instantly to about 22mA average (there's still

spikes during transmit of course)

If you're using the Arduino WiFi101 library, call this instead to enable automatic sleep:

WiFi.setSleepMode(M2M_PS_H_AUTOMATIC, 1); // go into power save mode when possible!