Power consumption of central mode

[chjoon]

Hi, I would like to estimate power consumption in central(master) mode. However, power profiler in devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../ only provides power consumption in peripheral mode. Is any reason the estimation is provided only in peripheral mode ? Thanks.

[Stian Røed Hafskjold]

The power profiler only covers the most common use cases. If you want to estimate power consumption in central mode, I can give you some numbers. Are you looking for consumption during scanning or in connection?

[chjoon]

Thank you for helping me. Could you give me estimations in both conditions. And finally I would like to have power consumption for 24 hrs when 10 hrs in connection + 14 hrs in scanning per day.

[chjoon]

Thank you for helping me. Could you give me estimations in both conditions. And finally I would like to have power consumption for 24 hrs when 10 hrs in connection + 14 hrs in scanning per day.

[Stian Røed Hafskjold]

For central connection mode, you can use the peripheral connection numbers in the online power profiler. The difference is that TX and RX are switched.

For scanner mode it highly depends on the duty cycle of the scanning. The RX run current in BLE mode is about 7 mA. So if you have a 50% duty cycle you will get an average current of 3.5 mA

For your scenario, lets say you are scanning 10% of the time, for 14 hours, and in connection the remaining 10. And we assume a connection interval of 1 second. The calculation would be something like this:

Scanning: 7mA * 0.1 = 700 µA
Connection (from power profiler): 6.3 µA

700 * (10/24) + 6.3 * (14/24) = 295 µA in average

(TX power: 0dBm, voltage: 3V)

[chjoon]

Thank you so much Stian! It is very helpful to estimate power in our device.