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]

Running this in a virtual machine, on a mac seems like the bottle neck for sure. The segger connection needs to have the least amount of routes to the application, and explains the severe delays that you have. Also, mac is not supported officially, since we have never been able to get a stable measurement stream using mac. So for some reason the underlying driver for the J-Link OBD is not up to speed with what the ppk needs on a mac.

I would really advise to try this either on a native windows computer or a Linux machine (not officially supported, but made working by a lot of users).

The difference between stopping and enabling checkbox is that STOP stops the average data from incoming, while the marker checkbox just removes the markers. You might need to remove them for doing e.g. screenshots.