Unexpected 4 mA Spikes Every 1 s When SoftDevice Enabled – How to Avoid Them?

RE: Unexpected 4 mA Spikes Every 1 s When SoftDevice Enabled – How to Avoid Them?

Jared — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 16:38:01 GMT

Hi,

My apologies, I missed that the app_timer_start() is commented out in that snippet, but I'm pretty confident that what you see is as described here,

Setting NRF_PWR_MGMT_CONFIG_AUTO_SHUTDOWN_RETRY to 0 should fix the issue,

regards

Jared

RE: Unexpected 4 mA Spikes Every 1 s When SoftDevice Enabled – How to Avoid Them?

Purvesh patel — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 10:57:41 GMT

this is not my code , i m recreating the situation in ble_buttonless_dfu example of nrf5sdk

that was base with which i started

i noticed the same behaviour in it and it would be easy for you to recreate

the only change is i commented out adv_start in it , so idle_state_handle could put device in sleep . My main concern are the spikes.

last nrf5sdk with s140 soft device , tried on nrf52840 dk .

RE: Unexpected 4 mA Spikes Every 1 s When SoftDevice Enabled – How to Avoid Them?

Jared — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:51:19 GMT

Hi,

I think this is due to the app timer that you start in the code:

static void application_timers_start(void)
{
/* YOUR_JOB: Start your timers. below is an example of how to start a timer.
uint32_t err_code;
err_code = app_timer_start(m_app_timer_id, TIMER_INTERVAL, NULL);
APP_ERROR_CHECK(err_code); */
}

I couldn't find the definition of TIMER_INTERVAL so difficult to see if the timeout aligns with your measurements. But you could try to comment out that as well,

best regards

Jared

RE: Unexpected 4 mA Spikes Every 1 s When SoftDevice Enabled – How to Avoid Them?

Purvesh patel — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:38:50 GMT

not doing adv and conn during that period.

the device should go to sleep after adv timeout.

i have set up a wakeup timer using app_timer for it to again start adv.

but during sleep i keep getting spikes which are not desirable.

RE: Unexpected 4 mA Spikes Every 1 s When SoftDevice Enabled – How to Avoid Them?

snoopy20 — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 11:34:29 GMT

If you're not doing advertising or connections why would you have SoftDevice enabled?