Unable to disable GPIOTE for nRF Connect SDK 2.6.1

[Christopher]

Hi, 

Recently I upgraded to nRF Connect SDK 2.6.1 and I was required to enable the GPIOTE in order to build properly. Doing this has significantly increased (nearly doubled) the total current consumption at runtime. How can I disable this peripheral now? I am unable to do so now using the overlay file.

Old: 

&gpiote {
    status = "disabled";
};

New:

&gpiote {
    status = "okay";
};

Thank you,

[Simonr]

Hi Christopher

Susheel asked me if I could take over this case, and indeed it seems like something is drawing a lot of power on your external board. In my opinion 199µA on the older SDK is also a bit high if your application is just doing GPIOTE, so I'm guessing your application does something else as well. 

First off, to try and achieve the same power consumption on NCS v2.6.1, can you go through the migration guides for NCS v2.5.0 and v2.6.0 to make sure you've made all the necessary changes to your project in order to make it running as it should on v2.6.1?

Next, if you use Visual Studio Code and the nRF Connect extensions for development, you can use the nRF DeviceTree visual editor to see what pins and peripherals exactly are enabled in your project and check for any discrepancies between the NCS 2.4.2 and 2.6.1 versions of your project.

Best regards,

Simon

[grzegorz]

Hello Simonr 

Let's assume I want to drive some pins but don't need any interrupts. How can I have GPIO enabled and GPIOTE disabled? Using "delete-property" is not very elegant and we shouldn't need such hacks in my opinion.

[Simonr]

Please check out the DevAcademy course on GPIOs here that goes over the GPIO generic API that you can use for this I think.

Best regards,

Simon

[grzegorz]

Hi,

I'm not asking about API. This thread is about device tree. How to have GPIO enabled and GPIOTE disabled in device tree file without hacks.

[Simonr]

Hi Grzegorz

If you want to use the Zephyr GPIO driver, the interrupt handling is done from GPIOTE no matter what. But if you disable both the GPIO and GPIOTE and just use the nrfx library I think this should be doable without any "hacks". 

Best regards,

Simon

[grzegorz]

Hi Simon

Yes, it is doable, but it contradicts the move that Nordic made when it transitioned to Zephyr and device tree. In NCS the device tree is the source of hardware configuration. Disabling GPIO in device tree but using it anyway through nrfx is not very elegant and not consistent. So it looks like there is no good solution for that in NCS right now. Thanks for your support.

Best regards,
Grzegorz

[Christopher]

This used to work in the older 2.4.2. I had the following in all of my .overlay files and had much less current consumption with full functionality with all my GPIO interrupts. Now I am unable to achieve the same current consumption because I am forced to keep the gpiote enabled in all my device tree files. I guess, for now I am stuck on 2.4.2.

&gpiote {
	status = "disabled";
};