Power consumption 52832

[Jason Anderssen]

Hi,

I am relatively new to programming hardware at this level, and have developed our product on the 52832, so finally I have purchased the Power Profiler Kit, and downloaded the NRFConnect and power profiler software.

Please see the attached screen shot, and can I ask if this is a good result in power consumption, or should I be trying to improve it further?

Sorry for such a newbie question, and any extra information or links to information to learn about power consumption more, would be fantastic, and much appreciated.

Cheers and thanks in advance for your help

Jason

[Jason Anderssen]

Hi Einar,

Thank you for your response, I am writing a beacon (using PCA10040 DK) that advertises once every 2 seconds, which would be those spikes.

I have a timer I use when the user presses a button, but does nothing in normal operation mode (which is the sample in the screen shot)

I have rtc running, and have it call its callback approx once a minute. 

I also use pwm to power a buzzer, but only for certain aspects of the product, but not for normal usage (which is the sample as shown again in the screen shot)

Is there anything I should be aware of regarding the above features being active when in-active? 

Overall, the sample shown should be nothing more than a normal BLE beacon, advertising once every 2 seconds, and not buzzer, or timer should are currently running.

I am use softdevice 130 as well for reference.

Please see zoomed in screen shot as requested: 

Please let me know what else you need to help me.

Cheers and once again, thanks in advance for your help.

I have also noticed that if I dont activate the RTC, the following is the result, which I think looks better ?

Jason

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi Jason,

I see. The current consumption waveform matched an advertising event, so then we know what is happening there.

Your second plot shows the average current consumption including the advertising events, and this looks very good. It does not show only the sleep current, but it cannot be bad as you gut such a low average current consumption. However, you should get this level regardless of using an additional RTC or not, so there is probably something fishy with your FW. (The SoftDevice will already keep the 32 kHz clock active together with RTC0, and an additional RTC instance should only result in an increase in current consumption of 0.1 µA). Did you only disable the RTC to get to this level, or did you disable something else as well (perhaps indirectly, as not using the RTC prevents some other event from happening, so that you don't trigger usage of some other resource)?

You write that you use the S130 SoftDevice and the nRF52832. Is that really the case? The S130 is only intended to be used with the nRF51. The corresponding SoftDevice for nRF52832 is S132. Which SDK version are you using?

Einar