I've never used the R. Pi before, but am considering it (model A) for my application. The main attraction is the hardware H.264 encoder, but not the power consumption :(
I've read about a few power savings methods like using a switching regulator and turning off the TV & HDMI outputs. It seems some people have achieved around ~130mA according to here.
I still consider this too high for a battery powered application, which doesn't need to be on all the time. Can I do a suspend to RAM and how much power will this use? Is there a wakeup timer I can use to resume?
I've used microcontrollers before and know you can cut the power 5x (from 1mA to 0.2 mA) by putting it into sleep mode. Even when it's not asleep, you save power by running the wait for interrupt instruction, and disabling peripherals. Does anyone know if there's anything to gain by doing this?
Update: I found a very detailed and useful power data for the AM335x used by BeagleBone here. Thank you very much for publishing it. Even the standby mode (16mA) would be good enough for me. The biggest power consumers are the CPU and the DDR (not clear what VDD_CORE includes). Can I achieve something similar for the R. Pi?