If you’re developing battery-powered products it’s important to optimize your application to consume as little power as possible to extend battery life. As we’ve seen with Qoitech Otii Developer Tool, getting the right tool for development can help developers work more efficiently, and save countless man hours.
If you’re specifically working on products based on Nordic Semi nRF51, nRF52, nRF53 or nRF91 wireless chips, the company has just announced the Power Profiler Kit II (PPK2) that enables easy and affordable power measurement of average and dynamic power consumption in embedded solutions based on the aforementioned wireless SoC’s/SiP’s.
- 200nA to 1A measurement range
- Resolution varies between 100nA and 1mA depending on the measurement range
- Instantaneous and average current measurement for all Nordic DKs, in addition to custom HW
- Ampere meter and source modes
- Built-in programmable regulator with a 0.8V to 5V output range and up to 1A current supply
- 100 ksps sampling rate, or 10x greater than previous generation)
- 8 digital inputs enables low-end logic analyzer support
- 0.8 – 5V VCC levels
- Power Supply – 5V via USB port from host computer
The Power Profiler Kit II board ships with a 4-pin current measurement cable and a 10-pin logic port cable.
The kit is supported through nRF Connect for Desktop’s Power Profiler app that offers a unified GUI for both the PPK and the PPK2, and provides several ways of assessing the power consumption, both instantaneous and averaged over a set time period. It’s also possible to export measurement data for post-processing. The program is available for Windows 7/8/10, Mac OS 10.10 or later and Ubuntu 18.04 (or greater?). You’ll find it together with documentation on Github.
The idea is to help developer detect flawed or non-optimized software as indicated by an unusually high power consumption from active modules that may not be necessary for the task, and can be disabled by the software.
The Power Profiler Kit II (order code nRF-PPK2) can be purchased for $89 and up from distributors such as Mouser. More information may be found in the announcement and product page.
Thanks to Arnaud for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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