Suggestion: Use Ablic S-35770 to count pulses

[soosp]

Hi,
Sorry about openeing an issue, but I couldn't find discussion area for this project, but you can convert this to discussion.

A possible solution to the problem of high consumption of the device due to pulse counting is to use the Ablic S-35770 I2C counter IC. This way you don't need to wake up the device at every pulse, just read the counter on the I2C bus from time to time.

[IgnacioHR]

Thank you for suggestions. I'm not expert Github so I thank you for pointing me to the discussions section. I've just added it and configured a bit.

Your suggestion makes lot of sense. We could just configure the ESP to wake up once every hour, read the couter and transmit the value back to the coordinator. Let me just annotate here the list of changes to do in the code regarding the current counter and some pros and cons.

• As per the Datasheet, the counter is 24 bits, note the Zigbee CurrentSummation attribute is 48 bits. A possible implementation could just read the counter (amount of gas consumed in the last hour) and add up the value read to the internal 48 bit counter, then, reset the counter again to 0 and sleep for another hour.
• Current implementation of the counter calculates also the InstantaneousDemand. This value is calculated from the time passed between two consecutive count cycles. If we use and external counter we will loose this functionality.

I've just finished with hardware version 2 and will run some tests about power consumption and battery duration. The new version is based on a smaller Seeed Studio ESP32-C6 chip and I've attached two lipo batteries with a total of 4400 ma capacity. If the device last for one year working I'm satisfied, but if it last for just a couple of months, loosing functionality will be a must.

Regards
Ignacio