Very high current Issue with RF52832

[Mabbas]

Hello,

I bought Nrf 52832 breakout board.

Actually i want to measure the current consumption of chip as we want to use it. While advertising 26 bytes it consume really high current (10mA).

I want to ask it is real current consumed by chip(which i suppose is not true.)

Why the Nrf 52832 breakout board needs to high current. I am totally unable to get the real current needed for the chip.

Could you please help me to resolve the issue?

waiting for kind help.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi Mabbas,

The current draw when radio is active can be 10 mA, or even more, depending on your configuration. The average current consumption on the other hand, should be much lower. You can check the expected average current consumption using the nRF52 Online Power Profiler.

Even with shortest possible advertising interval and max output power, the calculator show average consumption of 629 uA with a payload of 26 bytes.

Follow up questions:

• How do you measure the current consumption? I would recommend getting our Power Profiler Kit if you do not allready have good equipment.
• What are the advertising interval and output power for your device?
• Are you using DC/DC power mode? (Note that your board must have additional components for this to work)
• Do you put the device in system on/idle mode in your code?

This post is a great staring point for reducing your current consumption. It is written for nRF51 series, but most of the principles apply to nRF52 series as well.

Best regards,

Jørgen

[Mabbas]

Hello Jørgen,

Thanks for your reply. THe advertising interval is 500ms. The Txpower is set 0dBm. I am getting about 7.25 mA for it.

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

According to the Online Power Profiler, you should be able to achieve ~28 uA with these settings. You need to answer my other questions for me to help you further.

[Mabbas]

I am measuring the current using Multimeter. I don,t know about the DC/DC power mode i am simply using the Nrf 52832 breakout board and configured the chip to have 26 byte adv data , odBm power and adv interval 500ms. I think the current calculated is the power only consumed by chip and it did,.t includes the power consumption radio. Am i right?

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

It may be that your multimeter is not able to see the average consumption of the chip and only report the spikes of the radio current. I would suggest you get a dedicated power profiling kit or some other tool suited for this kind of power measurement. The online power profiler includes all current consumed by the IC, including the radio current. Please see the detailed description below the summary, and also read the linked blog post describing the measurement method. If you want, you can upload a hex-file of your application, and I can quickly check the current cunsumption for you. If it is as high as you say, we need to look at your code to figure out why.

[Mabbas]

Hello Jorgen,

The Multimeter is able to measure average current and i have tested with other equipment. I have a question: How much current i should expect if i use sd_power_system_off() ?