Problem facing to measure current in nRF51822 MC

RE: Problem facing to measure current in nRF51822 MC

kvrb — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 04:53:18 GMT

Hi Sorry for late reply, I can able to get the current measurement of nRF51822 Custom board.

I removed LED and resistance. I am getting around 37Micro Amp in sleep mode and while packet sending, around 14.30mA consuming.

Thank you, both Jorgen and stain. Really Thanks your informative explanation.

RE: Problem facing to measure current in nRF51822 MC

Stian Røed Hafskjold — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 16:11:57 GMT

Why are you using a LED and resistor in series with the multimeter? Are you measuring on a PCA10028 dev kit? If so, are you measuring on the P22 pin? I also see that you let the HF crystal run all the time (clocks_start()). This will consume a couple of hundred microamps.

RE: Problem facing to measure current in nRF51822 MC

Jørgen Kvalvaag — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 10:05:44 GMT

If you are always reading 1mA, perhaps the debugger is still connected to your board? (It draws about 1mA whenever connected). To configure RTC interval, you can set PRESCALER to 4095 and CC[0] to 8*seconds.

RE: Problem facing to measure current in nRF51822 MC

kvrb — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 03:51:35 GMT

Thank you, Jørgen Kvalvaag and Stian.

I am able to modify the code and Tx and Rx working fine but the while measuring the current I couldn't able to see the current measurement in a multimeter. In multimeter, it is showing always 1. I measuring the current using LED and resistance in series with a multimeter.

One more thing that, If I want to change RTC so that Tx will transmit packet every 15 sec, what is configuration I need to modify..?

Please see attachment heremain.c

RE: Problem facing to measure current in nRF51822 MC

Stian Røed Hafskjold — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 12:51:09 GMT

As Jørgen says nrf_delay_ms() will keep the CPU running. Check out my answer here to see how to use the RTC to trigger an SPI transmission: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../. You can change this to trigger the ESB transmission instead.

RE: Problem facing to measure current in nRF51822 MC

Jørgen Kvalvaag — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 10:56:15 GMT

You cannot use nrf_delay_ms to delay in sleep mode. When nrf_delay_ms() is executing the CPU is running and you should see around 4mA. (not 1.3)

The HFCLK consumes around 500uA, and it is always running in your code. It can be turned off when you are not using the radio/ESB library.

To make better current measurement, you can use the RTC timer to send packets at desired intervals, and call power_manage() from the NRF_ESB_EVENT_TX_SUCCCESS event.