Any tutorial on how to read the measurements reported by the PPK?

[Mohammad Afaneh]

I've gone through the user manual for the Nordic Power Profiler Kit, but I can't find any basic information on how to understand the plots and the measurements reported under the Average and Trigger windows. For example, are there any step-by-step guides for best practices or practical steps on how to measure the current draw and power consumption and how to make sense of the values?

Also, one thing I'm seeing is that the values shown in the Trigger window are at zero and don't change (see attached picture).

[wlgrd]

There are no step by guide on how to use the numbers per se, but the docs explains what the different measurement sets describes, i.e what in the graph you are measuring.

Can you also attach what you are seeing in the trigger window? This will be 0 if there are no data in the trigger chart (which only happen when the consumption has reached the trigger point set in microamps).

The best way to read current from your DUT, is to let it run and do a cursor measurement between events you know happen at a defined interval. E.g, if you have a beacon application, that does nothing between sending some packets on air, you will have a spike in your measurement upon every radio event. Place the cursors (using the average windows) right after each event and read the AVG number from the cursor measurement.

You will also get a continuously updated measurement at the very bottom of the settings window, showing the average consumption for the whole average window.

The trigger window is just there to let you look at your events of interest in more detail, they don't help you much with measuring the overall current consumption of your application.

Trying out my mspaint skills, and have here set my cursors to where I would put them to read the average measurement. Either that, or let it roll for a couple of seconds and read out the numbers at the bottom, in case something else is happening between the radio events.

[Mohammad Afaneh]

Thanks, @wilhelmsen.

The zero-values issue in the Trigger happens intermittently, but I'm attaching a picture nonetheless (in the original post).

Some of the things I'm noticing:

• The Trigger plot is still active, meaning it is drawing values, even when it's disabled and/or Stopped from the Trigger control section. Is this normal?
• If I stop both the Average and Trigger, the plots eventually stop drawing values, but only after a few seconds (it used to take up to 60 secs or more, but I made the change discussed in this post).
• I'm still seeing delays, even with the above change to the Python script, which makes it really difficult to measure the readings from an event trigger in the firmware such as pressing a button.