nRF Connect SDK Critical Questions (Power Consumption & Bare-metal)

[clockis]

Greetings,

We are currently evaluating the nRF Connect SDK in comparison to the nRF5 SDK for our new product (BLE enabled & battery powered) for which low power consumption is a vital and critical issue. We want to have a BLE connected device (with OTA DFU) with the lowest power consumption possible.

Questions:

1. Can we use the nRF Connect SDK as bare-metal without using Zephyr RTOS to achieve such a functionality as the one described above
2. Regarding the same application (very similar application and execution flow) how much higher would the power consumption be when using the nRF Connect SDK with Zephyr RTOS vs. the nRF5 SDK with a bare-metal application (of similar complexity and execution flow)?

Thank you in advance for your time and I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

Best regards,

Stavros Filippas 

[Einar Thorsrud]

Hi Stavros,

1. The nRF Connect SDK is built around Zephyr and there is no practical way for using the nRF Connect SDK without Zephyr. However, Zephyr can be quite minimal, and you can for instance build your application using a single thread (though other libraries like the Bluetooth stack will use some threads internally).

2. Zephyr adds very little overhead, so you should not expect any practical difference in current consumption between a bare metal application and a Zephyr based applications. (There are of course some instructions run here and there related to the scheduler for instance, but hit is negligible in practice).

Einar