High background current of BLE beacon

RE: High background current of BLE beacon

Stefan Birnir Sverrisson — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 13:07:25 GMT

This bug is present is present in S110 softdevice before version 8.0.0. So if you use RC for 32kHz clock source and you disable the softdevice, you will most likely see ~1mA sleep current after that. Are you disabling the softdevice in your application?

In your case it is 4.5mA and that does not directly reflect the behavior of this bug. Perhaps there is something else changed in S110 8.0.0 that fixes this for you? Have you looked at the release notes of S110 8.0.0 to see it the additions or bugfixes reflect with anything in your application code?

Anyway, if you are using S110 7.x.x then you could add the fix suggested on the linked thread.

RE: High background current of BLE beacon

diode — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 16:32:43 GMT

Hi Stefan, I didn't use bootloader (but I did use the 32kHz internal RC oscillator), but your suggestions led to the answer. I was using SoftDevice 7.1.0, the background current was 4.5mA and peak current was 14mA. Then I tried SoftDevice 8.0.0 with the same application, and the background current became 3uA and peak current was ~13mA. So SoftDevice version did make a difference even for bare application code without bootloader. But is this a behavior you are also excepting from the bug in SoftDevice 7.1.0?

RE: High background current of BLE beacon

Stefan Birnir Sverrisson — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 15:37:15 GMT

Have you gone through the troubleshooting section in the current consumption guide?

Are you using bootloader? Bootloaders prior to SDK 8.0.0 draw excessive current, see fix on this thread.

Let me know how it works out.