robots don't save power in event.pull loops

[xarses]

[Story time, read below for issue] After plopping down my first micro controller (and fighting to get it running) I found that it appears to be using way more power than I thought it should. According to something (probably walla) said that is has 10,000 RF energy and it used about 1200 during the night cycle (it has a solar generator)

According to my config it has 1,000 power and a consumption of 0.1/t. Night cycle is ~10 min so about 12,000 ticks. If we multiply our consumption and power by 10 to get 1 unit usage per tick we end up with. 10,000 power, usage 1/t. So if there was no energy conservation, we would have run out of power before the sun came up. We only used 88%.

[story end]

but before I sat down and looked all this up I figured, what about computers? what about robots? The robots seem to use less power in a event.pull loop.

so I sat down and ran this test on a robot and computer (both in lua terminal)

computer.energy() event.pull(100) computer.energy()

While the computer started with 11327 and ended with 10985 using 387 energy. With a base usage of 1/t + some noise (0.05/character/t) for the screen. given the screen had about 50% full (50_16_0.5=4000.05 = 20 ) We should have consumed (21/t * 200 = 4200) and with a sleep bonus multipler of 0.1 (4200 \ 0.1 = 420) so no we are about correct

100 * 20 (tps) = 200

We can see that in the robot we started with 34797 and ended with 34695 to use 102 energy With a base usage of 0.25/t * 200 we should have used 50 energy before invoking the sleep bonus (0.1 * 50 = 5) we could have used 5 energy sleeping for 100 seconds, instead we used 100 energy

[fnuecke]

Just to make sure, mind re-testing this with a raw pullSignal to make sure there's not just something triggering events every so often (leading to a busy-ish wait)? Thanks.

[payonel]

I've tested this in numerous ways using raw computer.pullSignal using different levels of sleep periods using os.sleep() in openos using event.pull in openos

And in all cases I am definitely seeing 10% the energy usage when sleeping vs working

Why was this happening to xarses? The only reason I could see this not work for xarses is if his machines were busy receiving signals. A signal will cause the machine to wake up from the pulSignal (or sleep) even for a cycle, it is possible that the robots/microcontrollers were actually handling signals, and if they are handling signals when the "is running" check occurs, then the energy savings will not be made

[payonel]

it is also possible that we've fixed something in this area -- it has been about a year and a half. though that does seem unlikely to me, but possible