Tiny, low power drive for teensy watch/compass

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I'm drawing up a Teensy compass with a fake needle, powered by battery. I am trying to get a full day out of it and the mechanism to move the needle is obviously the biggest power draw. I think I can get about a full day with a budget of 1200mAh and this stepper: https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/seeed-technology-co-ltd/108990003/1597-1203-ND/5487797 if I drive it at 3.3V.

3.3V / 25Ohms = .132A
1200 mAh / 132 mA = 9.09 hours

(Maybe more if there is a bit of friction that holds the needle in place when it is un-powered?)

What I really want though, is something smaller and even lower power. What might I consider instead of this solution, or is this about as good as I'm going to get? I see super small steppers on Alibaba, but with no impedance or drawings provided, so not sure what they actually are.
 
That seems to be the case - bad suggestion - they trade position control for speed control:
Moving even further from the 90° range, there are also full rotation, continuous rotation, or simply 360° servos. As the name states, the shaft turns continuously, making them useful as drive motors. Visually, they look just like regular servos.

Look carefully, and you’ll notice the “360°” mark on the packaging.
Rather than controlling position, the continuous rotation servo translates the 20 mSec pulse-train signal into the rotational speed and direction of the shaft. Otherwise, they’re very similar to regular RC servos – they use the same power supply, control signals, 3-pin connector, and are available in the same sizes as RC servos.

Also they seem to eat power to hold position rather than go idle:
Even unloaded servos can draw quite a bit of power. For full strength, you should be sure that your power supply can provide at least one Ampere per servo.
 
Don't those stepper motors stay put when you turn off the power? If the teensy went to sleep, I think it would just stay where it is.

Do you need it to be refreshing the needle position all the time or can you have the user press to activate/deactivate? And maybe you could just have an accelerometer to wake it up.
 
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Don't those stepper motors stay put when you turn off the power? If the teensy went to sleep, I think it would just stay where it is.

Do you need it to be refreshing the neele position all the time or can you have the user press to activate/deactivate? And maybe you could just have an accelerometer to wake it up.

ooh, I like that idea. I'll give it a shot - hopefully they don't get knocked out of position easily without power, that might be perfect.
 
A true stepper has a fair bit of holding torque when off, even more when powered up. Where life may get complex is if you are micro stepping, since powering down in that state will tend to snap to the nearest step, which may be courser than your solution would like.
 
to deal with "servo jitter", or idling jitter, i used a pca9685 and created 2 functions that accessed the chip directly using i2c (aka no libraries). this allowed me to send new position without blocking loop() code, the pca9685 would drive it to the requested location even without a "for loop". the second function had a timeout that was ran from loop, that would retract position and put the pca9685 into sleep dislocating the servo data line and causing all jitters to no longer exist
 
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