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]

This is what my current setup looks like:

• Using nRF52832 dev kit
• I'm running this on a mac in a Windows Virtual machine (VirtualBox) - (not sure if this really makes a difference)
• Firmware running on the nRF52832 is the BLE throughput demo firmware
• I have a serial terminal program open (need it to control the throughput demo) and detect when I need to stop the capture

I tried disabling the Trigger right away after starting PPK, and it seems to behave much better. However, I still see a big delay when stopping the average capture (and in displaying the data in realtime). For example:

• I press the button on the board to start data transfer
• It starts and I see it in the serial output
• I wait till it finishes transferring then I press stop in the Average control panel
• The data/plot keep rolling in and most of the time it stops after the relevant measurements during the data transfer have passed and are now outside the window.
• So, in the end, the data that I'm interested in disappears off the plot and there's no way to go back to it.

Any ideas why this could be happening? Suggestions on how to fix/work around it?

Another question related to the software, what's the difference between Stopping and unchecking the Enabled checkbox? Are they different? and if so, how?