Is heart rate service the correct thing to use for power consumption efficiency?

RE: Is heart rate service the correct thing to use for power consumption efficiency?

endnode — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 20:13:19 GMT

This is multidimensional problem so it depends from which side you go;) If you are interested into which chips and Soft Devices are supported by given SDK release then go into its release notes. If you are interested which SDK and SD are recommended/supported for given chip family/flavor/revision then you go to Infocenter and see particular compatibility matrix:

RE: Is heart rate service the correct thing to use for power consumption efficiency?

tyler — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 17:17:26 GMT

Where can I find the information on what chips are compatible with which SDK versions and SoftDevices?

RE: Is heart rate service the correct thing to use for power consumption efficiency?

endnode — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 22:42:26 GMT

Sure, nRF51 is not supported in nRF5 SDK after v12.3.0;)

RE: Is heart rate service the correct thing to use for power consumption efficiency?

tyler — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 20:24:37 GMT

Is there a reason you would stick to sdk version 12.3 instead of upgrading to sdk 14 on the nRF51 device?

RE: Is heart rate service the correct thing to use for power consumption efficiency?

endnode — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 22:52:30 GMT

Come on, you won't get any reliable judgments by asking some random folks on and internet forums;). You need to build some prototypes and measure it, that's the only real way forward. Looking to the specifications and doing "back of an envelope" guess based on numbers there you should expect (if you know how to optimize the HW and FW!!!) anything between 10 and 50% of lower power consumption when going with nRF52810/52832 instead of 51x2x, but real numbers depend on so many factors that it's useless to discuss it further here.

RE: Is heart rate service the correct thing to use for power consumption efficiency?

tyler — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 16:37:02 GMT

Using the best HW and SW is a good idea, I should look into that. Do you have a ballpark estimate of how much better the power consumption would be using better HW and SW, i.e. would it be a large decrease like 40% or a small decrease like 1-2%?

RE: Is heart rate service the correct thing to use for power consumption efficiency?

endnode — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 16:27:04 GMT

First note: if power consumption is so critical why you don't use the best available HW and SW (= nRF52, S132 stack and nRF SDK v14 - in case you really really need to stick with nRF51 then S130 and SDK V12.3.0)?

To your main question: it seems that you know what is exact profile of your application activity over time (what adv. interval you want to use, when the device will be ACTIVE/POWER ON SLEEP/POWER OFF, when/how long/what parameters will be used when under connection) then you can do some modelling and find out which of these modes will contribute dominantly to your power consumption. Then optimize your profile with this in mind. It would be kind of dumb to advise just based on feelings (which is what we do here right now I'm afraid... "my FW does almost nothing except little bit of this and that...")