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The ATmega328 (i.e. arduino without the garbage) is that microprocessor.

It can sleep and only use ~66 microamps at 5V with the watchdog timer enabled. That's 330 microwatts. A 1000 mA lithium cell (3.6 watt-hours) could then run it for ~10909 hours, or 454 days (~1 1/3 years).

Almost every microprocessor made these days has some sort of low-power sleep. The ATmega series aren't even particularly good at being low-power.

Of course, you then realize the "arduino" is really just a badly designed development board for an atmega, and they went and used cheap voltage regulators that have an idle current consumption of > 1 mA, and give up on the whole project.

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Arduino a poorly designed board is up there with the iPod being lame. Arduino was designed to be accessible and lower entry barriers and it became unrivaled for these purposes. If you want to have long lasting battery powered project you just power directly with 3.3v.

I spent some time* working on the firmware side of developing custom electronics based on various AVR chips, ATmega328 among them. Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project. They're not even that great for prototyping. Besides the aforementioned hardware design issues, the "arduino" language(really just C++) and core library had several problems both in terms of code quality and abstracting over things that shouldn't be abstracted over when working with such a limited chip(8bit, 2k SRAM...), like significant memory allocations and interactions with SREG.

My EE partner in crime ended up designing a prototyping board himself, with various creature comforts included that we needed shields for with Arduino, and I ended up writing just C with avr-libc instead of using any of the arduino library/tooling, developing a set of core modules to use the things we added to our boards, in a more flexible manner than the Arduino library. It took some time, but it saved us a lot of time and friction in our future prototyping efforts.

All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering. I do think they could've done a better job bridging the gap between that and prototyping though.

* Ten years ago, so my memory of specifics is very fuzzy and only reflects the state of things back then.

> Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project.

Baby’s first microcontroller project is exactly what they excel at and, by doing so, they made hobbyist microcontroller development vastly more accessible.

The Arduino value comes from the ease-of-starting and they made that a lot easier than the then-extant state of the art.

>Arduinos are not good for much more than babby's first microcontroller project

So ... exactly for what the device is being sold as? Weird complaint: "I purchased an apple, and all I got was an apple that's only good as an apple."

>I spent some time working on the firmware side of developing custom electronics based on various AVR chips, ATmega328 among them*

Then you would know that ATmegas are in a lot of successful commercial products from the past.

>So ... exactly for what the device is being sold as? Weird complaint: "I purchased an apple, and all I got was an apple that's only good as an apple."

Like I said:

>>All that being said, there's nothing wrong with Arduino as a platform for learning and personal tinkering.

I was just adding my 2 cents on Arduinos based on personal experience. That is all.

>Then you would know that ATmegas are in a lot of successful commercial products from the past.

Yes. What led you to believe I was suggesting otherwise? I made no criticism of the ATmega328, any other ATmega chip, or the AVR ISA for that matter. I could make some if I wanted to, but it doesn't seem relevant. The topic was Arduino boards, which typically contain an AVR chip, but is in fact not a chip but a dev board.

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