static power during advertising with nRF52832

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

JeffThorsen777 — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 11:27:39 GMT

Thanks a lot!

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Simonr — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 08:25:59 GMT

The DC/DC regulator can be used as an alternative to the LDO regulator and will reduce current consumption compared to when using the LDO regulator, by adding an external LC filter to be connected as shown in the figure below:

To get an estimate of how much your current consumption will be reduced I would suggest checking out the Online Power Profiler, and setting the DCDC regulator option on and off after you have set the parameters your application will be using.

Best regards,

Simon

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Reza papi — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 08:01:31 GMT

I am using nRF5 SDK. Could you please tell me how this decreases the current consumption and how much?

Thank you.

Best,

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Simonr — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 06:50:03 GMT

Sorry, I missed that question in your last reply. Are you using the nRF5 SDK or the nRFConnect SDK for development? In the nRF5 SDK at least, you can enable the DCDC by calling "sd_power_dcdc_mode_set(NRF_POWER_DCDC_ENABLE)"

Best regards,

Simon

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Reza papi — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 12:55:00 GMT

Hi,

Thank you again for your reply.

Could you please give me some information about my other question, Dc to Dc regulator.

I wanted to minimize the current as much as possible.

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Simonr — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 08:41:59 GMT

The current consumption seems much more reasonable now indeed. Glad to seee that. The spikes you're seeing are caused by the PPK when it switches to a smaller measurement resistor because of the sudden current increase. Unfortunately, the firmware doesn't filter these out as well as we would like. These won't affect the average current consumption, so it's not anything to worry about, but it will make measuring the max. current consumption harder to determine.

Best regards,

Simon

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Reza papi — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 05:07:03 GMT

Hi,

Thank you for your reply. I change the code and now it seems the power consumption is reasonable. Am I right?

but still, there are some spikes as you can see in the photo during advertising mode up to 18mA.

I have not activated DC/DC regulator in the code. I see some posts in the forum that suggest to active it to further reduce the current consumption. Could you please explain how this helps to minimize power consumption?

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Simonr — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 09:16:04 GMT

I'm not sure how great of an idea it is to use a screwdriver for shorting like that. Can you also test to see if you get the same current consumption by powering the DK "normally" with a micro USB? Ampere mode is recommended, and seems to be connected correctly. You can remove the bottom GND cable that you've connected to the + side on the External supply header though, as it serves no purpose.

As you can see the floor current of the basic ble_app_uart example shouldn't draw much more than 1.2mA by default, and there should still be room for improving the current consumption I think. Please check out my colleague's guide on current consumption here, which you can check out to see if there is something you can do to your example project.

Best regards,

Simon

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Reza papi — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 16:04:22 GMT

Hi Simonr,

I am using PPK 2 in Amper mode. I modified the BLE UART code to transmit an array of data every 1 minute. So there is an RTC timer in the application that every minute causes an interruption and turns on the radio to send the packet of data. the code works to transmit the packet for the first time but when RTC wakes nRF up to send for the second time there is some error with it. But the power consumption that I showed was for the first transmission.

Here is my test setup. For the measurement, I cut SB9 and short SB11 with a screwdriver during measurement. Thank you

RE: static power during advertising with nRF52832

Simonr — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 13:23:17 GMT

Are you running the PPK 2 in Source or Ampere mode here? Can you show me how the PPK and nRF52 DK are connected? From the IDLE mode it seems correct, even though some of those noise spikes are very high.

The base current of ~7mA is very high indeed, so either there must be something incorrect with your setup, or the radio is running constantly in your application. What application do you have running on the nRF52832 DK? Is it based on any of the projects in either of our SDKs?

Best regards,

Simon