Power Consumption when using Mesh Light Switch Example on nRF52840 Custom board

[Mahesh kumar]

Hi,

I am using nRF52840 on my custom board and Mesh SDK 5.0.0. I am testing the Mesh Light Switch example on my custom boards(one for client and two for server)with battery. It is working but cosuming power as 20mA per second. How can we reduce the power consumption on custom board. I am using the same code as given in the Mesh SDK by changing the BSP_LED_0 pin number to 34. Please suggest me how can we reduce the power consumption.

Thanks

Mahesh kumar

[Mttrinh]

Hi,

It seems to be a bit high, could you try testing with a DK as well?

Do you have DC-DC enabled on your board? This should reduce the current consumption.

Just note that using Bluetooth Mesh causes higher power consumption than traditional Bluetooth low energy applications. This is mainly due to the need for keeping the radio running constantly.

[Mahesh kumar]

Mttrinh said:

It seems to be a bit high

Do you mean it is normal to have 20 mA power consumption in BLE Mesh?

Mttrinh said:

Do you have DC-DC enabled on your board?

Yes, i have enabled on my board.

Do you have any solution to reduce power consumption other than low power node example(which consumes about 8 mA).Which is also very high for my application. My board runs on 3V coin cell battery. 

[Mttrinh]

Hi,

No, I don't think 20 mA power consumption is normal in Mesh. Like I said it seems a bit high,  If you like to reduce the power consumption as low as possible then the LPN example is the way to go. 

Mahesh kumar said:

which consumes about 8 mA

How did you measure the consumption, is this during scanning? 

Have you established a friendship with a friend node? 

The point with a LPN, is that the node should be asleep most of the time and wake up periodically to poll messages from a Friend node. The average sleep current(idle) is much lower.

Read more about the Low Power node feature here.