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.

[wlgrd]

This is weird, and the trigger nor the average should keep running after issuing stop. Seems like there are package errors in the transfer.

• Can you tell me more about your system and setup?

• Is this behavior seen from the very beginning, and if not, how much time does it take to behave like this?

The first thing you could try is to not run trigger and average at the same time, see if that makes any difference. I have seen the delays you're mentioning, but after removing the logger it has been close to perfect. If both trigger and average has been running for too long together, the jlink seems to get congested and you'll might notice this behavior. The docs say to not use both because of this reason. If you have an extra debugger available, you can also try that. I might build a new firmware, that is sending less often to see if that might fix it for those having this issue