Hello

I am completely new to electronics and microcontrollers so please bear 
with me while I try to explain.

My current working project controls my plant grow light depending on the 
brightness (eg. sun is up/very cloudy/blinds are down).
It does so by using an AZDelivery Nano V3.0 with Atmega328 CH340 
(Arduino compatible) to poll a light sensor on an analog pin.
It then compares that value to a calibrated value to decide whether the 
plant light should be on or off. This then gets sent by means of serial 
communication with a ESP-01s over WiFi to my RaspberryPi** which 
switches a TP-Link HS100 smart switch on or off.

Although convoluted, it works fairly well but uses a lot of power as I 
never put anything in sleep mode and it's constantly connected to WiFi.

Now I would like to implement some means of saving power so that I can 
maybe even run this thing on a 9V battery for, I don't know, weeks at a 
time?

Additionally I would like to compare the value from the light sensor not 
against a single value because a cloud moving in for a few seconds would 
unnecessarily switch the light quickly. I thought that maybe I instead 
use an upper and lower bound and only switch when the value exceeds 
either, and do nothing in the middle range. I could easily do this in 
code however with the power saving I thought that maybe there is a nice 
way to do this with some additional parts.

Here are some of the points I'm having trouble with as I have no 
experience in electronics:

1. I've read that putting the ATmega328 in sleep disables the ADC, 
enabling the ADC in sleep so that it can be used as interrupt consumes a 
lot of power. Is there a way to make the lower/upper bound check in 
discrete* parts (while not using a lot of power?) so that I just use one 
or two digital pins which can wake up the ATmega328 for processing the 
brightness change.
2. I've also read that the ESP-01s does not have the means to wake up 
from deep sleep without soldering to the extremely tiny chip or by doing 
a reset (RST to GND). I would maybe just trigger a reset by pulling the 
RST pin of the ESP-01s to LOW through a 330 Ohm resistor and through an 
ATmega328 digital pin. Does that make sense?
3. Maybe there is even a way to accomplish the whole thing without even 
having to use the ATmega328***. The ESP-01s has a fairly capable 
microcontroller that can be programmed and two GPIO pins, so if I was 
able to do the brightness comparison in discrete* parts and then use one 
or two GPIO pins of the ESP-01s I could technically read the light level 
(not the exact value, just whether its below or above the lower and 
upper bounds) directly on the ESP-01s and then trigger the RaspberryPi** 
from there. Although that leaves the problem with the ESP-01s not being 
able to wake up from deep sleep without a reset, or maybe this can be 
implemented in discrete* logic too?

I hope that I have explained my issue in a comprehensible manner and 
that maybe you guys could give me some pointers what could be possible 
or even a completely different and more power saving approach. My main 
concern is the ability to save power to be able to run the whole thing 
on battery power, although the lower-upper-bound-thing would be a 
necessary addition in the future anyways.

For the lulz I have added a picture of the thing that I've made so you 
can point and laugh at some shitty beginners project ;) Note that right 
now I am using USB to supply power as the 9V battery has already 
drained.

Thank you for your time,
Gachl

\* Excuse my probably misuse of the term "discrete logic" or "discrete 
parts" - I don't just mean and/or gates and the likes but rather 
comparators and other parts outside of the two microcontrollers that I 
am currently using.

\*\* I'll probably be able to implement talking to the HS100 directly 
from a microcontroller so I can even skip having to talk to the RPi 
first but that should not be of concern right now. The Pi right now is 
necessary as it contains a real time clock which checks whether the time 
is between 8am and 8pm because the plant light should not be on outside 
of these hours.

\*\*\* I suppose an even better approach would be to use a variant of 
the ESP8266 that has more pins available but I already have three 
ESP-01s so I'd like to stick with them now.

first step to save power is to reduce the chip count. Reading the sensor 
can be done with an ESP8266, so you can save the arduino board 
completely. Deep sleep the ESP8266
https://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=esp8266_power_usage
and you achieved your goal.

drm wrote:
> first step to save power is to reduce the chip count

Absolutely, that would be the idea described in point #3 but...

drm wrote:
> Reading the sensor can be done with an ESP8266

...can it be done using specifically the ESP-01s? It's got no A0 pin.

Although I could probably use an external ADC and hook it up to the 
ESP-01s, then wake up every 30 seconds to get a reading and, if a 
brightness change has occurred, connect to WiFi and trigger the Pi.

As far as I know using deep sleep throws away all variables so I 
wouldn't know if the value has changed and if it would be necessary to 
connect to WiFi at this point. Or is there a way to persist the last 
status through deep sleep cycles?

Gachl wrote:
> then wake up every 30 seconds to get a reading

Uh, never mind, that won't work as the ESP-01s doesn't support waking up 
by itself.

Although for specifically this purpose I could probably do the soldering 
job required to do this. It's still doing a reset tho so I wouldn't know 
the previous state of the light.