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I am looking to find a way to communicate an alarm on a tiny device with a very low profile low power consumption component. The alarm is binary in nature, basically it is either on or off.

LED does not seem to be the best option here because the nature of the alarm is such that it may go on for hours and I do not want to keep powering an LED for hours.

I was looking into the flip-dot components but I could not find any that is low profile. The tiniest ones I found are around 10mm x 10mm x 20mm. I do not have that much room for a very deep component.

I was thinking about e-paper solution. A very tiny 10mm x 10mm x 1m with only one binary cell/dot would totally work for me but I was unable to find such a thing with basically 1x1 resolution.

Any idea how this can be done with a very low profile component with minimal power consumption?

MarkU
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kaptan
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    How about a LED that flashes once every 10 seconds? – analogsystemsrf Jun 29 '19 at 01:31
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    Yup, flashing LED. One of my present projects is doing just that. A 3 mS pulse is easily visible. 4 mA is plenty for modern LEDs. Use whatever rate is necessary to get the user's attention. At 3 seconds it is only 0.1% of continuous power. – Mattman944 Jun 29 '19 at 02:36
  • Flashing LED is an option that I am thinking about. But I am running of a 35mAh battery which is supposed to run for months. Ideally a component like a color e-ink that you can set once would work the best, I think. – kaptan Jun 29 '19 at 03:38
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    @kaptan Are you willing to design and make your own? You don't need to use a disc for the flip dot (doing so would require enough depth to allow the disc to rotate.) You could use a narrow rectangle on an axle, instead, keeping a very low profile for it. If you need area, you'd need to parallel-align several of these to keep the low profile. But it could be done. (Louver/shutter arrangement.) – jonk Jun 29 '19 at 03:38
  • @jonk I am not planning to build my own flip dot. I wish I could :D But the idea of the rectangle plate is interesting. I haven't seen any component off the shelf like that. Do you know any? – kaptan Jun 29 '19 at 03:41
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    @kaptan I'd recommend looking at watch-makers. Energy is at a HUGE premium in watches (people expect their watch to operate for a VERY LONG time with very tiny batteries.) For example, see [this patent](http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8514170.pdf). But that's not the limit. Watch-makers have insanely low power for their crystal oscillators and pretty much any kind of display they use. So that should be fertile ground, when searching. No promises on availability, though. – jonk Jun 29 '19 at 03:43
  • @jonk wow this patent is really interesting. Identifies some of the problems I am facing. I will try to see if it is built by anyone or not. – kaptan Jun 29 '19 at 04:03
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    @kaptan See also the Journal of Information Displays as a source for bistable display technologies. Those articles might lead you to industries to try calling around. The reason I brought up watches is because I worked with the Seiko team doing the Seiko message watch. This beast would run two years on a button battery and included a custom 6502 MCU (western digital) and an RF receiver for sideband message reception. The power budget was insane and needed the brilliant folks involved (not counting myself in that group.) No one knows crystals as well and what they know they keep quite secret. – jonk Jun 29 '19 at 04:11
  • @kaptan But that's why the first place I decided to google up was watch technology. – jonk Jun 29 '19 at 04:12
  • Tnx a lot @jonk for the info. I need to do some digging. Watch industry sound like the right direction. – kaptan Jul 02 '19 at 19:58

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