nRF51/nRF52 Power Profiler Kit

nRF51/nRF52 Power Profiler Kit

The Power Profiler Kit is an easy to use tool for the measurement and power consumption optimization of embedded solutions.

The Power Profiler Kit plugs directly into the nRF51 DK and nRF52 DK development kits through the Arduino Uno Revision 3 standard pin headers, in combination with the special power measurement header on these kits. This allows easy power profiling with a minimum of hardware work needed. There’s also an additional connector for power consumption measurements on external boards, so you can connect and power profile your final hardware as well. It supports Vcc levels between 1.8V and 3.3V and has an onboard regulator that will supply up to 70mA to external applications.

The Power Profiler Kit has an advanced analog measurement unit with a high dynamic input range. This allows accurate current consumption measurements for the entire range typically seen in embedded applications based on nRF devices, all the way from single µA to tens of mA. The time resolution is high enough to detect spikes.

The Power Profiler Kit supports both external trigger input and a trigger output. This makes it possible to combine the use of the Power Profiler Kit with oscilloscopes and logic analyzers. Code-synchronized measurements can be achieved by connecting the external trigger input to an I/O pin on the device being tested. This I/O pin must be configured to output a synchronization pulse.

The PC software for the Power Profiler Kit has an easy to use graphical user interface. With dual measurement windows, you can simultaneously watch one window with longer, averaged acquisition times and one window with high resolution to show trigger events. Window sizes can be easily adjusted depending on application needs. A subsection of each window can be selected for average current calculations and the instantaneous current can be read at the boundaries. This allows validation of peaks and long-time averages at the same time.

The PC software is based on Python 2 and runs on version 2.7.11 or newer. This needs to be installed separately.