Power Management

Power management of sensors is often a non-trivial task as sensors may have multiple power states for various channels. Some sensors may allow for low noise, low power, or suspending channels potentially saving quite a bit of power at the cost of noise or sampling speed performance. In very low power states sensors may lose their state, turning off even the digital logic portion of the device.

All this is to say that power management of sensors is typically application specific! Often the channel states are mutable using :ref:sensor-attribute. While total device suspending and resume can be done using the power management ref counting APIs if the device implements the necessary functionality.

Most likely the API sensors should use for their fully suspended/resume power states is :ref:pm-device-runtime using explicit calls at an application level to :c:func:pm_device_runtime_get and :c:func:pm_device_runtime_put.

In the future, with :ref:sensor-read-and-decode its possible that automatic management of device power management would be possible in the streaming case as the application informs the driver of usage at all times through requests to read on given events.