nrf8002 Power consumption and nrRFgo

[Stavros Tsardounis]

I am designing a product with the nrf8002 chip and have a question on Power consumption. Lets say I leave all the default ratio's alone and use a CR1620 battery which has 75mah. By default, I get .53 years or about 6 months of battery life. If I adjust the "Time distribution" the battery life changes.

I am using reference design plus adding speaker, but for argument sake, we will say the speaker is not there and the application of this is for tracking "stuff" that you would lose. So you never really connect to it, just always scanning for a previously paired device and only connecting when you want to make it beep, then disconnecting.

Here are my questions:

Adjusting the "Time distribution" in NRFgo Studio under "Current Consumption" have any effect in the programming or is that a reference guide for use case scenarios? If it is sleeping 100% I get over 17 years....

How accurate is the Current Consumption monitor?

Any changes on the reference design that can be done to decrease battery consumption?

Any changes to Advertising Interval, connection interval, ppm, slave latency or connection timeouts that can be done to better optimize this chip?

[Hung Bui]

Hi Stavros,

Adjusting the "Time distribution" is solely use case for current measurement. It has no effect on the real power consumption. In fact all the option in the "Current Consumption" panel has no effect on the real power consumption (the xml configuration file)

The current consumption monitor based on the electrical properties in the spec so it will not be 100% accurate. It should be used only as a reference source. You should do actual measurement on your board.

By changing to longer advertising interval, and connection interval you should be able to decrease the current consumption. Higher ppm, larger slave latency would also help.

However, this changes of course have negative effect, such as longer response time, longer connection establishment, slower data rate, higher chance for the connection to break , etc.

So, you need to balance them and find the golden ratio that's best for your application.