Sudden Battery Drain and Unexpected Current Spikes in nRF52832 Device (nRF5 SDK 17.0.2)

RE: Sudden Battery Drain and Unexpected Current Spikes in nRF52832 Device (nRF5 SDK 17.0.2)

Einar Thorsrud — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 09:32:46 GMT

Hi,

[quote user="Madhav M Lohar"]Due to uncertain behaviour of this problem it might take some time to get plot of device consuming more current.[/quote]

I understand. I look foward to seeing the plots when you get them along with detailed explanation of what they show.

[quote user="Madhav M Lohar"]I missed one point to share is that. When a device starts consuming more current then it will consume same amount of current (approximate 1-5m Amp) even if the battery was removed and reinserted (Device restarted).[/quote]

This is interesting, and not expected. Can you share the schematics of your design and explain a bit more generic about it? Are there other components on the board that is expected to draw significant amount of current, and can there be physical factors that remain the same after a power cycling (removing and re-inserting battery)?

RE: Sudden Battery Drain and Unexpected Current Spikes in nRF52832 Device (nRF5 SDK 17.0.2)

Madhav — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 09:10:01 GMT

Hi Einar Thorsrud,

Thank you for your quick response.

Due to uncertain behaviour of this problem it might take some time to get plot of device consuming more current.

I missed one point to share is that. When a device starts consuming more current then it will consume same amount of current (approximate 1-5m Amp) even if the battery was removed and reinserted (Device restarted).

RE: Sudden Battery Drain and Unexpected Current Spikes in nRF52832 Device (nRF5 SDK 17.0.2)

Einar Thorsrud — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:14:58 GMT

Hi Madhav,

We have looked at this but are not able to match your description with 1-5 mA current during sleep to what we see in the plots. Can you please share plots that show more detail, and clarify at which point in which plots we see the different states (bot active state, epxected sleep state, and exessive sleep current)? It owuld also be good to use the selection tool of the power profiler so that we see the average current for these states only and can compare (so the problematic idle current compared to expected).

That said, if the additional curent consumption was in the order of 0.3-1 mA, that could be explaind by for instance some peripherals requesting the HF clock on during sleep for some reason. When you write up to 5 mA, so you then mean peak current or average during the problematic time? The PPK is not very good at showing short peaks, so we should focus on the average current in idle.