Power Profiler kit disconnects and the NRF52DK

[agrelogix]

Hello, 

First time posting, Here are the details of my setup, I would greatly appreciate any help from anyone at this point.
I have purchased 2 nrf52 development kits with 2 power profiler kits to go with them. I am trying to measure the current / power consumption of a lithium ion battery CR2477 in a small test circuit.

1 NRF52DK with 1 PPK plugged together / stacked.

1 external circuit / hardware in breadboard.

1 CR2477 coin cell lithium ion battery (3.0 V).

1 Computer with NRF Connect wand power consumption app installed. (V. 2.3.2 for NRF connect, and 2.0 for the power) 

The NRF52DK has jumper SB9 cut, and SB12 joined (as SB12 is for external source)

I have 2 jumper cables running from the battery holder, to the PPK External supply. 

I also have 2 jumpers running from External DUT to power the breadboarded circuit.

After I've connected the DK to the computer (PC) it asks for a firmware update, I agree and continue. I select the COM port to use and select start.

It seems to work from here, and we'll get to that in a bit. But after pressing start, the system disconnects or drops into an error for no apparent reason. Please see image below:

I'm not sure if the quality is good enough, however the text under the red highlight it says: "Corrupt data detected, please check connection to PPK"

At this point nothing has changed, no cable has moved, and I checked various micro usb cables connected to the DK. 

The issue persists. 

Another screenshot of the logged info can be found below: 

I'm not sure if this is a known issue, but we're in a tight deadline to test our circuits for power consumption / battery life and it's a bit troublesome that it doesn't work as expected. 

I would greatly appreciate anyone's help. I have this setup up and ready to run if anyone has any suggestions or need more information from the device / me.

Thank you in advance

[agrelogix]

Hi,

Purchased another full kit (DK and PPK) I flashed the BLE blinky to the DK and then ran the PPK application, and I do see data using the dk as DUT. But only if I use the internal regulator as the power source. 

However if I also use the DK as DUT but use an external battery as the power source, I don't get data. The battery is a 3.0 V Panasonic CR2477 coin cell battery. 

I have plenty of them here, aside from being new, voltmeter says it's a good battery. 

With either of these setups, the PPK application in windows and mac still freezes or stops doing acquisition with the same error (cprrupt data) 

[Bjørn Kvaale]

Will you need simultaneous current & voltage measurements from the battery? From what I've understood from this conversation, it seems that you need to power the PPK via the nrf52 dk, via a usb cable to the PPK or via an external power supply, but not a coin cell battery.

An "easy" solution would be to run an example on the DK that has an almost constant current draw from the battery. I have written a blog post on this here. It is absolutely not an ideal way of doing this, as I am using the multimeter to measure the current. 

Instead, you could consider running a nordic example that has a "repeatable" current profile. That way, you should be able to connect up the ppk to the board & take current measurements without using a battery. Then, you could hook up the battery to the dev kit, run the same example & measure the coin cell voltage via the ADC. 

You would need some kind of timer that starts the application after a given number of seconds to be able to synchronize the current measurements with the voltage measurements afterwards. 

This is all just conjecture & I am not sure it will work, but it could be worth a shot!

[wlgrd]

Been away for a while, sorry for the late response. 

I find it hard to see what's actually happening here, since replicating your setup (per my understanding) causes no errors and things are working fine. I will do more testing to try and replicating your problem. Can you take a picture of your setup?