I have measured the power consumption of the VM in all clock modes I know. To do this I connected a simple DMM in current mode between a 6V power source and the battery compartment. I did this once with my SerialToVM connected and once stand-alone. The normal modes I tested were watch mode, sleeping while in watch mode and transferring data to the VM. In game mode I used a simple endless loop which used getkeys from tetris.s:
loop call getkeys jmp loop
To measure the power in sleep mode with different clock modes I sent the VM into sleep by pressing the sleep button while running the loop above.
The values for sub-clock mode were measured with RC clock oscillator still running (bit 1 of OCR = 0).
Before December 15th, 2000 the "Sleep SerialToVM" and "Stand-alone" columns were accidently swapped, sorry. The text version posted on vmu-dev on April 25th, 2000 was correct.
| Mode | SerialToVM | Sleep SerialToVM | Stand-alone | Sleep stand-alone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6MHz | 9.2mA | 3.7mA | 8.6mA | 3.0mA |
| 3MHz | 6.0mA | 2.4mA | 5.4mA | 1.65mA |
| 600Khz | 3.6mA | 1.3mA | 2.9mA | 0.55mA |
| 300Khz | 3.2mA | 1.1mA | 2.4mA | 0.35mA |
| 32.8kHz | 1.5mA | 0.9mA | 0.65mA | 0.15mA |
| 16.4kHz | 1.4mA | 0.9mA | 0.65mA | 0.15mA |
| watch | 1.0mA | 0.25mA | 0.85mA | 0.1mA |
| Data transfer | 5mA, 8mA peak |