Disabling LD5 to Decrease Power Consumption

[Burnie Barren]

Hello,

I am trying to decrease the power consumption of my board (nRF52 DK) so that I can only see what's consumed in advertising beacon demo. When I measured the current, it gave 1.3 mA which is a few orders larger than I expected. At first I thought it is due to debugging mode, but I believe I had power-on-reseted the board - I simply pushed the reset button while powered on, is there anything I am missing? So now I would like to bypass the leds. I was able to disable the user leds but I could not find the code that initiates LD5. Could you please guide this beginner in this matter?

Thank you for your attention.

Burnie Barren

[Simonr]

Hi

Sorry about the late reply, but I've been out of office the last few days. 

LED5 on the nRF52DKs will not have any effect of the measured current when using the nRF current measurement pins on the DK (which I assume you're using) as these pins will only measure the current drawn by the nRF52 SoC on the board, while the LED5 is connected to the Interface MCU (next to the LED5).

It could still be that the device is in debug mode, as you'll need to power cycle the board (turn the device off completely before removing the power source entirely before turning it back on). Can you also provide some details as to how you measure the current consumption on your board? Are you using one of our Power Profiler Kits? And what is your application is your DK running?

Best regards,

Simon

[Burnie Barren]

Hello Simon,

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I am using the current measurements pins and I use a multimeter to do the measurement. 

Simonr said:

(turn the device off completely before removing the power source entirely before turning it back on)

Thank you, I believe I must have done this in one of my trials but will give an explicit try. 

I am running ble_app_beacon demo from SDK 17.0.2.  I added the code for activating dc/dc regulator and it actually decreased the current to 0.68 mA. That is good news, however from the supply around 2 mA was still drawn. I am planning to excite this board with a piezo harvester so I believe instead of the current drawn by SoC solely, I should be more concerned about the current supplied by the external source, right?

I am open for any suggestions to decrease the power consumption.

Best wishes,

Burnie Barren