For my project's purposes, I need to send data wirelessly and very regularly (every 3ms); it also needs to be power optimized. I got a version of my code to work using ESB, 2 nRF5340DK's, and NCS v2.5.0 (based off nrf\samples\esb\).
I am porting the code (especially for PTX) over to nRF54L15DK and NCS v2.9.0 (based off nrf\samples\esb\), in order to have a device that's more power optimized than what the nRF53 could provide. But I see an issue occurring several times per second where the PTX is unable to send packets for a period of 20-100ms. In addition, the average current draw shoots up to around 5mA for that period of "being unable to send packets" (and as a result, the average current overall shoots up as well). I added LED toggles in the PPK2 digital channels to confirm this (channel 0 is on LED0 and toggles on each ESB_EVENT_TX_SUCCESS, channel 3 is on LED3 and toggles on each esb_write_payload() call).
I replicated the issue based off the NCS "nrf\samples\esb\" examples. See screenshots here, and my attached projects that I used to produce these results. Note that PTX project was flashed onto nRF54L15DK, & PRX and empty app core projects were flashed onto nRF5340DK...I did also briefly try the NCS v2.9.0 ESB PRX sample on another nRF54L15 (so 2 nRF54's, one sender and one receiver) but seemed to have similar results.
This is a very critical issue that we need to solve for our project; otherwise it will be a show stopper for us. Why does the current draw increase, almost as if the processor is blocking/waiting for the ESB packet to be sent off?...I would really appreciate any help regarding this ESB issue. Thank you in advance!
More info: I am using a Windows 10 machine, VS Code, & nRF Connect extension. It was already mentioned earlier but we're also using nRF54L15DK's, nRF5340DK's, and the PPK2.
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Side note - for a brief time, I did not see this issue occur on nRF54. We had kept several versions of the code and confirmed that ESB did not have this issue. But all of a sudden, this problem appeared, and we were unable to reproduce the "no ESB issue" results we saw in those saved versions. Could it be some hardware issue?...Not added to main question, as the "no ESB issue" results were not reproducible.
