nrf52832 Measurement

[Kveso]

Dear Nordic members,

I am currently trying to measure the power consumption of the nRF52832 with the nRF52 DK. I am very new in the evaluation and testing of BLE Chips, that's why I need some help. I already did some measurement with the Heart Rate Demo and the results are as expected very good. But to be able to evalute the Chip, I am interested in changing some parameters like the output power and the data length. Is there any software that can provide me this? The aim is to see what the current consumption at maximum settings is. With maximum data length and changing output power. Also it would be good if I could enable the DC/DC mode to get these values too.

Thank you very much in advance and best regards, Adrian

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

Hi,

Have you looked at the nRF52 Online Power Profiler? This is based on measurements done on the nRF52832, using the method described in this blog post. You can use the same Power Profiling Application if you want to do further measurements.

Best regards,

Jørgen

[Kveso]

Thank you very much for your quick response. Regarding this I have some further questions:

• Where do I enable teh DC/DC regulator exactly?
• Where do I enter der parameters for my measurement?

Thanks in advance and best regards, Adrian

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

You can enable DC/DC regulatior inside your main function, either before softdevice initialization by setting NRF_POWER->DCDCEN = 1, or after softdevice initialization by calling sd_power_dcdc_mode_set(1). To adjust the output power by calling sd_ble_gap_tx_power_set(). For data length, you will have to edit the content of your advertisement package to contain the correct number of bytes.

[Kveso]

Where do I have to set the tx power level? Or what do I have to do exactly? Because I found the function where I think I could or should change something in the ble_gap.h line 1373. Is this the right place to enter the output power? And how do I do this? Thank you in advance and best regards

[Jørgen Holmefjord]

You can call sd_ble_gap_tx_power_set() anywhere in your code after initializing the softdevice (BLE stack), to set/change the tx power. The default is 0 dBm.