RE: Excessive current in System ON, Idle mode

Scott — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:10:27 GMT

Problem was a bad board. Other boards behave as expected.

RE: Excessive current in System ON, Idle mode

Stefan Birnir Sverrisson — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 14:27:04 GMT

Hi Scott

Ok, that is strange. I have tried this on the ptx_ack_payload example in nRF51 SDK 9.0.0. I measure 4.5uA on my nRF51-DK board with the following code:

int main()
{
		// Setup port directions
		ui_init();

		// Initialize ESB
		(void)nrf_esb_init(NRF_ESB_MODE_PTX);

		(void)nrf_esb_enable();  

		// Add packet into TX queue
		my_tx_payload[0] = input_get();
		(void)nrf_esb_add_packet_to_tx_fifo(PIPE_NUMBER, my_tx_payload, TX_PAYLOAD_LENGTH, NRF_ESB_PACKET_USE_ACK);
	
		nrf_esb_disable();

		while(1)
		{
			__SEV();
			__WFE();
			__WFE();
		}
}

So I suspect one of the following reasons for this behavior:

You have enabled something in your code that you have not disabled again. perhaps the best way to figure out what that is is to block out sections of your code until you see the expected current consumption.
You have custom hardware and there is leakage current somewhere, on GPIO pins, SWD pins or somewhere else.

Try also to go through the hints in the current consumption guide, "Measure current consumption" section