Interested to hear from people on any low power devices used for OpenWRT.
Now most people run their routers 24hrs a day I would expect power usage becoming more important. I' running my power for the house from a battery during the night ( gets charged via solar during the day), so every bit of power usage saved helps during the period of the year where daylight is in short supply.
What is your definition of "low power"?
I'm not sure you'll get much good information here as not many have a way of accurately measuring the power draw at the couple of Watts these devices typically draw. I've got an Archer C7 v2 with a later Class VI TP-Link wall wart and a "Kill-A-Watt" is claiming it's drawing 3 W. I wouldn't be surprised if that's close, but I don't much trust an inexpensive consumer device that covers at least a 2000 W range to be able to accurately measure the 1-10 Watt range.
My gut feeling is, past either running 12 VDC direct to the device or ensuring you're using a properly sized Class V or VI power supply, you're not going to see significant gains among any of the devices.
Yes, some of them might consume a Watt or two more with their fancy flashing LEDs and RGB illumination or their more powerful CPUs, but I'd be surprised if you can save more than a Watt or two over your run-of-the-mill 750 MHz-class single-core MIPS box.
I'll see if I can find the connectors I need later on today and hook up a good DVM to measure the power input to the Archer C7 itself. It's been curiosity for me for a while. I have to run on UPS power occasionally here as well, but with the power draw likely under 5 W, was never high on my list to pursue.
Archer C7 v2, running ath79 off master, 5 GHz radio active at 30 dBm TX power (1 W) on 80 MHz channel with traffic, 2.4 GHz radio shows 25 dBm TX power (~0.3 W), no associated stations.
No Ethernet
~ 350 mA peak during boot
~ 280 mA once running
~ 280 mA * 12 V ~ 3.4 W
One Ethernet connected with enable_eee: 1
~ 290 mA once running ~ 3.5 W
Then running while true ; do swconfig dev switch0 show ; done (and pumping that over ssh over the wireless)
~ 360 mA ~ 4.3 W
My usbModded TP-Link ArcherC50v3 runs with max 270mA at 9volts ( 2,43W) with 2,4 ghz wan connection and 5ghz mesh/wpa2/3stations max dbm, with ping through all subnets no usb device attached but the 7805 Vreg running watching youtube via ethernet (1 client) --> measured after barrel plug with 2 different VoltMeters 4,7/Mbits going through the mesh. Sadly i have no way to measure the powersupply in a safe and easy way atm.
greetings emh