I'm building a device that needs to "light up" to indicate status to the user. I of course want to use LEDs to light the device up, but I'm worried about battery consumption since I would like it to last for a year on batteries if possible. The device will be using its LED(s) for around one hour each day.
What are the best ways to get power consumption down for the LEDs? Using PWM? Is it better to use a high-intensity LED or several lower-intensity LEDs? Blinking the LEDs is ok, in fact that is the most obvious power-savings trick I've found.
Best Answer
Power the LED by a small flyback converter. The current limiting resistor can eat a lot of power. Note, this schematic is only an illustration. Some design/programming work have to be done.
Something like this:
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
Here is a simple model (for LTSpice IV) of the above schematic. It demonstrated efficiency of 95% and higher: