NRF52DK power consumption with demo UART

[Maxim]

Hi, I am currently working to measure power consumption on a custom board and I found huge power consumption while advertising (BMD-300 1.15mA DCDC enabled).

So I have tried to do the measurement on my NRF52DK to see if there is any difference with the following procedure:

• Cut the SB9 trace
• bypass the diode with a short circuit on SB12
• Power the board with the provided coin cell

The full procedure is described Here

The program loaded on the NRF52 is ble_app_uart_pca10040_s132.hex directly provided by the nRF5_SDK_12.1.0_0d23e2a.zip. The program is loaded with nRFgo Studio.

And I measure:

1. -On advertise + Led1 blink: 2.85mA/3.05mA
2. -Connected + Led1 ON: 2.29mA
3. On sleep + Led1 OFF: 2.20µA

So my question is this normal to have so much power consumption on the NRF52DK or is my measurement are biased by my multimeter (Metrix Mtx 3281)

Thanks you for your answers !

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Hi Maxim. I have just run the code using the power profiling kit and an nrf52 dev kit. I get an average current consumption of 2.66 mA when advertising. During sleep, this value drops to a similar value that you measured. When connected, I get an average current consumption of 2.42 mA. So it seems your multimeter measurements are spot on. Looks like you don't need a PPK after all :) Although if you want graphs and more statistical data, it might be useful to get a PPK kit.

[Maxim]

Thanks a lot for your answer !!! My multimeter is still operational :)

But now i'have a really important question, why on the nRF52 Online Power Profiler avaible Here it's indicate 21µA with 3V and 500ms advertising and our measurements are 100x times higher (2.4mA >> 21µA) ??? Is the System_On (WFE idle) broken on this demo code ?